


The Unfortunate Delusions Of The Angel Odbody

by Garmonbozia



Series: The Delusions [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-09
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-05 21:06:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 38,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5390366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garmonbozia/pseuds/Garmonbozia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young woman appears on the doorstep at Baker Street, ragged and thin.  She's brought all her worldly possessions, but don't worry, it's not much.  In about ten days, as she announces quite cheerfully, she will be brutally murdered.  She's more than okay with that, though, doesn't bother her in the slightest.  She will be staying with the Detective until then.  </p>
<p>You may have guessed, she's quite mad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s not a feeling.  People talk all the time about _feelings,_ about _feeling_ it coming, about something in the wind, but it is not a feeling.  It is… _sensation_.  Constant, elevated, everything, an energy in the brain that swells and grows and is unbearable, like an insect buzzing.  It’s feeling everything, at once, being aware because something is coming, and nothing just falls out of the sky.  When it arrives, it’s arrival will have been heralded, preceded, foreshadowed, and if you have missed these telltale signs then you will have an awful lot of catching up to do, where catching up is at all possible.  Worst case scenario, you have missed forever the key to the entire enterprise, and you will live, as most people do day by day, in a state of incomplete knowing, the sense that something has happened on the very edges of your vision, and by the time you turned your head it was all swept away.  That’s what the so-called _feeling_ is; hypersensitivity.  It is the intelligent mind’s way of preparing for potential excitement, collecting possible puzzle pieces as the body stores more fat in cold weather.   

It comes and builds, sometimes for days.  Then, the event, a pin in a balloon, the shattering hollow moment in which one realizes, whatever you may know, you are never prepared.

Or nothing happens at all.

You sit for days alive all over, swollen, feeling the precise weight of the dust in the air bouncing off your skin and hearing the song on the radio of the car at the corner of the next street, knowing something is coming, and nothing happens at all.  It turned around or it went right past or worse, worst of all, it happened and you weren’t paying enough attention.  They are awful days, when the something-coming feeling suddenly stops.  They are very cold days.  And I think, though I’m loath to admit it, that a cold day might be coming.

It wouldn’t be the first cold day recently.  London has moved into the gentle sort of spring that promises a bloody awful summer, but I have found myself trapped in echoing December. The need and knowing will come as they ever did, a day or two here, a week there.  But every time now, they pop.  Nothing has come.  For a while dead birds were appearing on the doorstep, but nothing came of that.  There was one little twittering of a case, a poisoner, teacups, all very polite and delightful, I had a nice couple of days, but that’s not what these feelings have been preparing me for, I’m sure of it…

Damn it, I’m at it too.  _Feelings_.  Not in the sense that most mean it.  And they have been with me now since the beginning of the week, so it hardly matters what I call them, because they are almost certainly about to drain away again and leave me cold.

The cold, of course, is a metaphor.  Therefore, the instinct to delay it’s coming by getting up and making coffee is disgusting.  That doesn’t stop me. 

I light the burner under the glass flask.  Sterilized, of course.  I believe the last thing in it, before it was turned to more nourishing purposes, was the gelatinous contents of several eyeballs suspected of holding the final traces of the poisoner’s craft.  Mrs Hudson wasn’t best pleased but then again, did catch another one of those murderers she’s always so disdainful of.  All’s well that ends well.  This new approach to coffee has also been a successful experiment.  Much more economical, to boil only one flask full of water as necessary.

Also the kettle is broken.  Heating filament.  These things burn out eventually.  They burn out especially quickly if one keeps turning it on when there isn’t actually any water in the chamber. 

That’s the other good thing about the burner and flask.  The flask always shows whether or not it holds water.  The burner does not click off automatically when _it_ judges its task to be complete, rather depends on me standing watching to remove the water when it’s boiling, before it boils over or the flask shatters.  Not that that’s happened, at all…  The upshot is, I always remember the water, and I always make the coffee, rather than forgetting it.

And the upshot of that is, I am holding a chemistry flask full of coffee wrapped in a tea towel, when there is a knock at the door.

I put the flask back down on the worktop.  No need to fend off the cold this time.  The something, finally, is happening.  And I know, in a small and ordinary mind, one might be thinking that a knock at the door isn’t necessarily anything.  The last time, the poisonings, that began with a knock at the door and it turned out to be little more than a pleasant distraction.  And I agree.  A knock at the door could be anything at all. 

Perhaps I should mention, though, it is _the upstairs door_.  My door.  Not the door in off the street, which locks and where therefore any visiting party might necessarily knock, but the upstairs door, the door of the flat itself. 

Which means that someone broke in downstairs, crept past Mrs Hudson and all the way up undetected, and now has stopped to knock.

Which means that the something is finally happening.

I take my first step towards the door as the second knock comes.  Then I take it backward, and pick up the coffee again.  Never know who could be standing out there.  A mug’s worth of boiling liquid, a shard of heavy, lab-grade glass, could come in useful.  I am fully prepared to defend myself, should the need arise.  Dear God, let the need arise.

The third knock comes just as I reach for the handle.  From it I judge that the visitor is small, not much more than five feet, and smaller yet because she is leaning to one side; carrying something heavy, struggling with it.  She (gender is obvious; her skinny fingers separate with the force of each knock and each narrow knuckle makes its own pulse within the roundness of the noise) is nervous, twitchy, shifting from foot to foot.  It’s hard to be sure but I believe she scratches while she’s waiting, a little flick of the forefinger at the forehead, bridge of the nose maybe. 

Upon opening the door, there’s more to learn.  Slender by build, skinny by poor and infrequent meals.  Well-kept but not cared for; clean but not groomed, clothing new but basic, impersonal.  Tired, but then the trouble with brand new shoes is that they make it very obvious if you have had to walk to get somewhere, and she would be tired, considering the hold-all slung across from her left shoulder, and the small tin carried in the crook of her right arm.  She’s had some recent injuries, though nothing visible, and has a weak left wrist, and… 

Actually, I lied.  There’s very little to learn at all.  Plenty to observe, but no conclusions to draw from it.  She is modern art; all story and reason have been removed, abstracted.  Someone, not her, has dressed her so as to create a sort of snow-blindness.  Many things that could mean anything.  My focus glances off her like a blade over ice.   

But she is something, and she is happening.

And though she seems content to stand silent with her luggage and suffer my attempts to see _something_ concrete in her slippery surface, we can’t linger here on the landing all day.  The coffee is starting to burn me through the tea towel.  To at least start us off, “Can I help you at all?”

Her head snaps up, eyes hunting mine, lips parted in rage and disbelief.  “You’re serious?” she says, “You don’t remember me?”  Now that she mentions it, now that those eyes are on me directly and _burning_ , lit and alive with untold labyrinths of frustration, wrestling with the ariadne tangles of a child’s fury, I’ve seen them somewhere before.  Dull cloud grey, huge and permanently wet, I’ve seen them.  But before I can just ask how it is that we know each other, it seems she has decided to show me.  Dropping her bag from her shoulder, setting the tin down carefully on top of it, she turns her back. 

Reaching over either shoulder she grabs great fistfuls of her inoffensive, unknowable jumper and gathers it up around her neck.  The bare skin of her back is scarred, from shoulder to waist.  Not the single heaving mass of a burn or any spray of shatter or explosion, but _intentionally_ scarred.  A number of tools were used; blades of varying lengths and thicknesses have left corresponding lines, tapering ends and bellying middles, flecks and stripes of skin peeled away entirely to leave the deep red pucker of flaying.  Little curls of pink that could only be inflicted with a hot wire.  And all of these in combination, like brushstrokes on canvas, paint her a pair of intricate and utterly fascinating wings.

Something is happening.  I could study that particular something for hours.  But she’s not a corpse in a morgue, she’s a girl on the landing.  I get only a moment to look before there’s a yelp from downstairs and my visitor struggles her jumper back into place and mutters, “Oops.  Think I might’ve just flashed your landlady.”

I lift my voice, “Nothing she hasn’t seen before,” and there is more henhouse fluster from below.  Knowing we’ll be left alone, I pick up my visitor’s bag – she grabs up the tin before I can stoop – and step out of the doorway.  “Do come in.”

She does it with savour and ceremony, acting on an invitation long-craved, enjoying that step across the threshold.  She takes in everything.  Rather impressive, actually.  Such dreaming, unassertive eyes, you’d never guess that they could assess almost instantly the number and age of bullet holes in a wall, the pinpricks where better and more exciting times were tacked up over the fireplace, that the wire that hangs from the headphones on a skull only hangs, and goes nowhere.  By following her gaze I see what she sees, and she sees details.  She also sees doorways, windows, latches, the holes on the insides of doorframes that indicate a bolt may be shot from the other side.  All of this in a matter of seconds. 

I’d wonder who trained her, if I didn’t already know.  If I didn’t already know I might be arguing with myself whether Mycroft could have sent her, and whether or not that would be too clever to expect of him. 

“Ooh,” under her breath, words she can’t hold back, “It’s just like the video.”

“Excuse me?”      

“Nothing.  You know who I am now, don’t you?”

Oh yes.  We met once, briefly, several months ago in a museum.  Her clothes were different then, and her arm was in a cast, explaining the residual weakness of her wrist.  I wanted to follow her that day, wanted to detain her and speak with her, except that I wasn’t alone and the other party wasn’t too keen on my speaking at all.  That’s another story, though.  Today’s story ought to begin, ‘Even had this creature not slipped away from me then, I would have known her by her wings.’  She is criminal myth, this lesser-spotted angel.

“Everything about you, except what you ought to be called.”

“Whatever you want.  It doesn’t really matter.  Anyway, we’ll come to that.”  In the legends, they say she loves her wings very much.  I tell you the legends lie; she rolls her shoulders now, reaches back to scratch her neck, the top of her spine.  I tell you, me and not the legends, they make her uncomfortable.  They make her feel vulnerable, so that she forgets what her opening lines are supposed to be and fumbles, dry-mouthed, until she finds them again and bursts out, “I’m supposed to stay with you for a while, is that alright?”

“Of course it is.  That upstairs room lies empty.  Make yourself at home.”

“Yeah, He said it would be alright.”  You can hear her capitalize the pronoun; it is the sound of the reverence that makes her wary of saying the name it replaces.  “I’ll be honest, I don’t really get it myself.”

I pat her shoulder, “That’s because you’re a pawn.  Tea?” 

“I’ll make it,” she smiles, and slips past me toward the kitchen.  By the shoulder again I catch her and sit her down at the table

“You will not.  You’ll sit down and make yourself comfortable.  After all, you’re a guest.”

“Thought I was a pawn?”

“Ah, yes, but a pawn on the wrong side of the board.  Very bright and brave of you.  You shouldn’t have to fetch and carry like you do at home.” 

“Okay, thanks.”  Her warmth and happiness are genuine.  This means absolutely nothing; the stories about her, each and every one of them, agrees on one fact.  And everyone knows, at the point where all stories agree, there it is that one finds truth.  The truth, then, about this creature here, smiling down at her folded arms at my kitchen table, is a lunatic.  Mad.  Thoroughly insane.  Stories differ on the nature and source of her illness, but all concur that she is ill.  The mad feel everything, feel it momentarily, feel it to the heart.  Genuine is nothing, because it will not last.  It fades even now while I’m looking for another clean beaker; slides off her face with a furrowing of her brow (which she _has_ been scratching at).  “But you should know,” mumbling, gaining confidence as she goes along, “You should know right now, that would work.  Trying to get me to admit things and not notice; like, I’d be admitting that yes, I lived with him and that yes, I fetch and carry, and that I do everything for him in return for very little.  But not all of those things are true and that’s really not any good way to get any information out of me, alright, detective?”

You will note, my qualifying moniker is not capitalized.  It is for etiquette and etiquette alone that I go unnamed.

I drop the teaspoon I’d been freeing from the sink with a clatter and walk away from the tea caddy.  I sit opposite her at the table instead and watch her tighten, seize, fearful flickering of the eyes around the room, looking for her mistake in midair.  She thinks I’ve turned on her.  She can’t understand why because, to her peculiar mind, she was only making sure we were on the same page.  But I appreciate that.  I have not turned at all, except a few leaves in a book. 

“Go on then,” and I nod from her to the burner.  Still afraid, she doesn’t move.  Imagine, coming all this way, going to all this effort, and she’s managed to make a mess of it inside five minutes.  She must be petrified.  Heaven knows what will become of her if she goes home a failure. 

But that is not what has happened.  I promise I’m not turning on her.  I have only come to appreciate the true nature of the person (after a fashion) before me.  “Sweet hapless little pawns who don’t know any better,” I say in explanation, “can have their tea made for them.  Callous little knights hiding behind a frankly paper-thin idea of madness can make their own.  Mine too, if I didn’t already have one.”

And so, with that, her mission saved and herself understood, she gets up and goes about it.  The burner doesn’t bother her, doesn’t stop her for a moment.  The beaker too is little more than a bump on a very smooth road.  She doesn’t so much as flinch at the forearm standing upright in the shelf of the fridge door as she reaches past it for the milk.  While the beaker is boiling, she hitches up on the worktop and sits next to it.  It really is remarkable, you know; I feel nothing like indignant.  She is acting as though she has lived here always, as though she belongs, and I am not overwhelmed with the urge to show her out.  Possibly out a window, possibly with the aid of my foot.  I feel nothing, looking at her sat there like a gargoyle.  She _looks_ quite as though she has lived here always.

That is talent.  In-built, God-given, inimitable, whatever you might like to call it, that is a gift.

But she has noticed me staring at her.  Time, perhaps, to move the conversation along. 

“Well?  Go on then.”  She only shrugs, and stirs the teabag in the bubbling beaker with a glass rod.  “He wouldn’t have sent you here without some proscribed opening.  I imagine it half-killed him just to give up minute daily control of you, never mind-“

“Control of me?”  Normally I wouldn’t stop midsentence, I’d finish what I was bloody saying, thank you, but the look on her face is so thoroughly baffled, such impossible confusion, _offended_ by even the notion, it seems, “He’s not given _that_ up.  He _can’t_ , God help him.  I’m sure he’d love to sometimes.  But the fact is, without him, I wouldn’t exist, so everything that I am or do belongs to him, whether he’s here or not.  Whether he wants it or not, he’s got control.  It’s not a matter of giving or taking or giving up or-“

“The _challenge_ , hm?  Answer what you were asked.”

“Oh.  Of course.” 

Before she does, she hops down from the worktop.  Doubling up the cuff of her jumper, she takes the flask down from the trivet and adds milk before bringing it back to the table.  And her tin, the little one she brought with her, chipped enamel showing a little rust on the corner, she pops it open on a clear space between items of apparatus, between us.  Inside, already cut into slices, the pale, creamy surface of a cheesecake shines.  “Oh, how quaint.  You brought an offering.”

“Yeah, well… s’only polite, isn’t it?” and, as is only polite, she hands the first slice to me.  I set it down in front of me.  It can stay there until I see _her_ eat.

Her eyes flick down, the slightest pouting protrusion of the lower lip.  “Forgive me; my last case… gave me a few things to think about.  At any rate, I’d rather have an answer.”

“He wants you to figure me out.  Not _me_ -me, like the thing sitting here across from you.  I think everybody involved has just given up on figuring that out.  I am what He made me, and that’s that.  I mean the old me.  The girl that Him and me used to make me-me.  He never got to know her, you see, and I don’t remember her.  He says we need her name and her birthday and all that stuff.  All the history.”

A moment’s hesitation while I unspool her imprecision to find the sense at the core.  “…Or else?”

“Hm?  What?”  She looks up from serving herself a slice of cake; the merest crease of a smile, the brow furrowed again.  Then, laughing, “Oh, no, no!  No, there’s no ‘or else’!  Christ alive, like He’d send _me_ to make a threat!”  She loses her breath, creeping towards hysteria.  “No, if that was the case, somebody scary would have made the threat and made you come looking for me, _obviously_.  God, and you’re supposed to be the clever one?  No-no-no, see, this is totally friendly!  This is Him just asking you a big favour and hoping you’ll help.”

Another pause, this time because I could not possibly have heard that correctly.  I look for imprecision to unspool, for some glint of fact, but there is nothing to find.  The only conclusion to draw, then, is that she was word-perfect, and there is nothing wrong with my ears.

“I don’t suppose he provided you with one good reason why I should?”

She nods.  Still glowing from her long, bright laugh, her smile is beatific.  With the charming grace of those long removed from their senses and not a single speck of negative feeling for any of it, I am offered the reason I requested.

“He just wants all of this sorted out, in case it turns out I have any family to inform.  See, in ten days’ time, he’s going to murder me.  We’ve got the circumstances all worked out, but it’s going to make DNA and all those other ways of tracing me really difficult.  So I think He just wants the record to be all straightened out before it happens.  You won’t be investigating my death.  You won’t need to because I’m going to tell you everything.  But at least somebody will be able to tell the detectives or whatever whose the body is.”


	2. Chapter 2

Generally I meet corpses after they have died. On occasion I have looked at a body on a slab, only to find someone I already know, or been acquainted, intentionally or not, with someone who later _became_ a corpse – intentionally or not.  But I really do believe this to be the first time the corpse has presented itself to me before the fact. 

Loath as I ever am to resort to platitudes, it seems that, after so many cold disappointments, good things come to those who wait.

She is blasé about her upcoming murder. In fact, no, she is positively cheerful, as though in ten days she were off to heaven only on holiday.  Visiting distant relations, perhaps, our nameless angel.  In her veritable excitement she promises to describe her death to me in every last detail, before taking off gabbling and clapping and telling me nothing of any worth whatsoever, punctuated by the occasional peppering of biscuit-base crumbs.  For the moment I allow it.  There’s the rest of her life to make her pare down her answers to simple facts, and I rather enjoy watching her go; the energy is phenomenal.  Only now and then does it veer towards boring or unintelligent.  Rabbiting on as she does it is quite normal for sentences to lose shape and form, to clatter from verb to verb without pause or qualification.  But her speaking, despite the toe-curling drawl of her accent and the tendency of her voice to climb and turn everything into an unanswered prayer, is relatively precise. 

“ _By way of example, there’s a little place down on Greek Street they all love. I supposed I could take you there or to Eddie’s Bar or the tailor’s, if you really wanted.  You’ll probably get around to asking me all that, I’m probably jumping the gun.  But you know if you go there you’ll get false names and maybe some real measurements.  And the second any of them catches a breath that you’ve been there, they’ll never go back again.  I mean, you and me together could probably ruin a lot of nice places, make some parts of London very uncomfortable for the whole network.  But I’m pretty sure that’s not the sort of help you really need…_ ”  All of this in the space of a few heartbeats, but word for word is understood.  The syllables glitter from between her lips like needles, steel static sparking off the table top.

She talks with her hands, too. I sympathize; a terrible habit I myself keep meaning to break, but the words never come quickly or expressively enough.  These hands, however, bony and fast as spiders, do more than just flap frustration, but shape air, seem to type the words unspoken.  Even in the silence between thoughts, she plummets through the world with untold velocity, and by the flutter of her gaze I know she is mapping my kitchen, and what of the living room is there to be seen at her periphery.

Very occasionally, as lost as she gets in her own chatter, all the martyred Hes and Hims coalesce and crystallize and become, _Mr Moriarty_.  Every time, I flinch.  Every time, I half-expect her to cross herself for the blasphemy.

It is her profanity, however, that really tells me all my recent and wholeheartedly ignored birthdays have come at once. Cracking at her lips like chewing gum, little snaps, all the proof I ever could have wanted that she is who she says she is, that she was begotten of the mind she seems to idolize. _Feck_ , _shite_ , _hoor_.

I allow her to go on rattling like an old projector, content to study her paradoxes, until she appears to be quite finished. It is, one notes, precisely the same time her glass beaker empties.  Politeness again, etiquette?  Being a good guest with a host who doesn’t seem to talk much?

Or, and here my judgement might be somewhat skewed by my opinion of her master, used to having nice things taken away from her. She talked in the hopes that I would not notice how much she enjoyed the simple pleasure of tea and cake.  Look at her; you could lift her over your head by the hoops of her collarbones.  To listen to the legends, she is a runner, most frequently sighted darting across town by the side streets and alleys, cutting along back garden walls like some monstrous cat.  They say she races around gliding on old roller skates.  So she bolts food.  When she finds it, when it’s offered, she grabs what she can and wolfs it.  When was the last time she both began _and_ finished eating something?  I’d bet she hoards.

But this, for now, is beside the point.

Most obligingly, she yawns, and I take the proffered shot. “You should rest.”

“It _has_ been a very long couple of days.”

“Tomorrow,” I tell her. I am as cheerful as I dare to be, “Tomorrow we’ll begin on you.”

A squeak of delight, another clap or two – suffice to say she is overjoyed and cannot thank me enough for agreeing to help, so on and so forth. Clients (and she is, after all, a client) do this all the time.  They are the moments when I most miss having John around.  Luckily I’m not forced to deal with it for long; I had left her bag on the living room floor, and even as she gurgles gratitude at me she goes to it and starts to pull out certain items.  Seeing me watching, seeing I don’t quite follow, “Well, I might as well leave it here.  You’re going to search it anyway, aren’t you?  You have to.  I mean, I can stand her and tell you there’s nothing bad in it, and there isn’t, but you can’t just believe that.  You have to check.  So there’s no point you having to wait until I fall asleep and then creep upstairs and not waken me, just to bring it back down, _and_ have to put it back.  So, look –“ And she shows me by turns these things she has gathered over one arm, “-pyjama trousers, hairbrush –“ which I take from her and make sure the handle doesn’t unscrew, that nothing rattles inside, “- and bathroom stuff.”

Trading the hairbrush for this last, a pouch which still flops it's so new; no little bag like this, owned for a time, still flops. They fill, they bulge, used-once items held in the hope of their next usefulness. I find it to contain nothing but what she said. It might still have proved interesting, except that every item is brand new, still packaged.  Like her clothes.  As if she had been born, a full-grown angel, just this morning.

As I give it back to her I nod down the hall, “First on the left.”

The bag is going to tell me nothing. I know that at a glance, based on everything else that has already told me nothing.  I know _her_ very well.  If she wished to be described and bullet-pointed as the creature she is now, I could have her out of here in ten minutes.  But where she came from, both in the sense she has asked me to investigate and the more immediate sense, these have been scrubbed out with bleach, with rock salt, with wire wool.

But she was right. I have to check. 

Not just yet, though. While she’s still in the flat I stand by the desk.  Waken the laptop, open what I’ll need, that sort of thing, anything so as not to be looking at her, not to be interested, when the lock on the bathroom door clacks again and she creeps towards the door.  “Leave your shoes and jacket, please.”

“Okay. But you should know, I only picked up the shoes in a locker at the Tube station, so those didn’t come with me from home.”  My teeth grit, air drawn in, but I won’t sigh while she’s still hovering there.  “Detective?”

“Yes, _thank you_ , you can go…”

The sticky scrabble of bare feet trying to scuttle off too fast, and I listen to them pound up the stairs. I even stand still for the little dance she does, three slow turns around the floor of a room that has stood empty months now.  Imagine the choreography printed, little sweat stain paw prints, in the dust on the floor.  Then the whumpf of her falling down on the bed and I fall across the room to her belongings.  In a second, the contents of the bag are on the floor.  Innocuous, and brand new.  Unbranded clothing, cheap, and I would know they were cheap even if I couldn’t touch them because the labels are still on most of it.  A notebook, empty, the leaves still catching each other at the edges.  A pen so new it won’t write straight away.  Books, those are older, charity shop prices written in pencil on the top corner of the fly leaf. _Frankenstein, Silas Marner,_ I’d say they were clues but they are far too obvious for that.  I’d say they were jokes but they are too well-loved, too broken in the spines, losing bundles of pages, marked in miniscule, rounded handwriting, stained with chocolate and tea and tracks of ragged fingernails.

That’s love, isn’t it? Love marks what it owns.  It takes a basic, mass-produced item and confers uniqueness, personality.

Takes a girl from normality, obscurity, and-

No. Incorrect.  An avenue of thought that should not be pursued and which I swiftly block off to prevent any future wrong turns.  There’ll be time soon enough to explore the reasoning, lunatic though it may be, behind her scarring and I don’t wish to get caught up in sharp edged nonsense.  She’ll be in front of me.  The mere mention of love, she’s liable to rhapsodize.  Disciples always do; they mistake their devotion for something deeper.  More dangerously, for something reciprocal. 

The unused debris of her, the build-your-own kit of a gleaming new monster, lies at my feet like pooling blood as I sit back in my chair.

Why send her?

Whatever other questions there are, that has to be the first. The moment she knocked on the door, it had to be the first question.  I have avoided it.  First by letting her talk, second by allowing myself to get sidetracked on the wardrobe-and-makeup department.  I have avoided it because I don’t know the bloody answer and I feel like I should. 

Anything Moriarty wanted to know about the girl he could find out in ten minutes. However I feel about him personally that cannot be denied.  My capacities are not required.  A tease; dangle the body in front of me, the opportunity to prevent it becoming a body, laugh when I can’t?

But the _danger_ …

That girl upstairs knows everything. She is the best possible source.  If one were the type and she were not already so utterly enthralled with the idea of her own death, she could be held at gunpoint right this second and marched through London to his door. 

It is Mrs Hudson’s, of all the voices, that I hear muttering to me, “Gifthorses, dear, _mouths_.”

But another woman, about a month ago, in a museum, pressing out of my foot with a cane so I couldn’t get up and follow said-gifthorse, and who wouldn’t tell me a thing about her, said only, “If that child ever comes to you for help, help her.”

She looked like a child then, in plaster up to the armpit and bundled up in winter clothes. Less so today.

Why send her?

Because it gives me a choice. Help her or use her.  As simple as that; I could spend hours spinning out the terms and conditions but it comes down to those options, help her or use her. 


	3. Chapter 3

Seven a.m., she gets up. Ten minutes later she slips downstairs and out the front door.  Remarkably quiet; if I hadn’t already been awake and listening I never would have known.  I had, however, expected her first stop to be the flat but despite a brief pause on the landing, perhaps listening to ensure she hadn’t roused me, there was no timid knock, nor any attempt on the handle.  The door isn’t locked, you should know, it almost never is.  In addition, I have been waiting for her, waiting to surprise her, had intended to be the unexpected one, and when one waits with quiet intent, one can be sensed.  Mutter whatever you want about energy, vibrations, bloody _chi_ , but one person thinking determinedly of another can be sensed.  She stood on the landing and, I’m certain, sensed me, before walking on.

Imagine her melting like quicksilver over the minute contours of each stair, pooling in the craters left by splinters, seeping under the door, only solidifying outside in the cold of morning. For all the noise she makes…

I still have her shoes. They’re under the desk.  They told me nothing except that she has some small abrasions on the soles of her feet.  Judging by the thinness of the bloodstains, they could be old wounds.  Very hard for the sole of the foot to heal properly, especially when she’s always on her feet.  Sweating and softening of the skin, and the itch.

Scratching, think of the frantic little rodent scrape – those ragged fingernails, those fast bony fingers, yes, it fits. Imagine her, idle in the smallest hours, awake in the dark and picking off her scabs.  Yes.  It fits.

Instinct is to follow. Wherever she feels she has to go, I ought to know about it.  It is almost certainly relevant.  Lost children go home, don’t they?  Lost pets attempt to find scent trails back to their masters.  The problem of whether or not she has come to me as a spy could be immediately solved by observing her make a report back to her handler.  Simple self-preservatory interest just wants to know where she’s going.

Her shoes are still under my desk. Her jacket is over the end of the sofa.  That didn’t give up much last night either.  Bus tickets, but lots of them, and many different routes.  Not unusual for her line of work.  This morning it tells me just enough that I can stay where I am; phone app says the temperature outside is around eight degrees.  In yesterday’s sweater, in no more than socks, she’s not going far, and is coming back.

For the second time, I won’t allow her to find me only waiting. She’s aware of me now, I won’t surprise her anymore.  No point, if I can’t put her on the back foot, so I ensure that I am otherwise occupied.  At least, that I look like I am. 

Not ten minutes later, the front door opens again. Must find out how she’s doing that, where she got the key, though it really is a secondary concern.  Theft and replication are common, boring.  Less common, less boring, at least these days, is someone pushing their way shoulder first through the door, carrying groceries.  Arms full, working the handle with her elbow, none of it bothers her, barely catches her breath, “Morning, detective.  I always forget you have to pay for a bag now.  It’s not like I didn’t have the five pence, but I just get pissed off buying something I know I’ve got dozens of.”  So she is carrying, awkwardly, bacon and sausages in the same branded packets the corner shop carries, fresh bread from the place around the corner, milk, eggs…

“Breakfast…”

“See, he _told_ me you were smart.”

“You’re making breakfast…”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Famished, actually; skipped lunch yesterday because of that buzzing in my head, that knowing, the – yes, fine – _feeling_ that she was coming, busy last night with her belongings and the knots I managed I tie myself in over her purpose and what to do with her, and yesterday morning I… I don’t remember, because nothing happened.  When, in fact, did I last eat?  Counting back through the socially-prescribed meals, when did I last eat?  “Yeah, I thought so,” she says.  She drops her shopping on the table.  An egg is bounced loose of the carton and rolls.  Headed directly for the base of a retort stand, where it will stop and wobble on its widest point, no danger of it breaking, but she does not see that.  She snatches it with a frankly charming accuracy.  “What do you fancy?  I can do bacon sarnie, full english, I can do pancakes, skinny _or_ American, could do an omelette, frittata-“

“You don’t have to cook.”

“…But you’re hungry. So am I.  Now what do you want, please?”

Make a hundred notes – bred for service, trained well, echoes the feelings of those whose approval she requires, eager to please – make a hundred notes but all of them muted, muffled under sudden and overwhelming hunger that was not there before she mentioned it. Make another note – is that her own trick, or was she taught?

“Bacon sandwich’ll do it.”

A gentle smile, the opening out of her hands, _See? Wasn’t that easy?_ , and she starts about it.  I move from the chair to the table to watch her.  She understands this kitchen.  It sounds ridiculous, but it isn’t.  There is a knob missing from the cooker; she grabs the pliers to turn the metal stub without even looking for them.  Her shopping fills fridge and cupboards without disturbing collected chemicals or biological samples. 

One hand spreads out above the frying pan to test its heat and, finding it wanting, is repurposed to stifling a yawn.

“Is it too early in the morning for questions?”

“Not if you’ve been up all night.”

Damn her, she’s good… “If I’m to find out all about you, I need something to go on.”

“There isn’t anything. That’s the point.”

“When is your birthday?”

“Depends what ID I’m carrying.”

“What age are you?”

“Same answer.”

I have a number of other questions waiting – the town she grew up in, siblings, how long ago she left, how old she was then – dozens of questions which, asked patiently, answered well, would draw forth all the fragments of a basic personality, the facts that make the mannequin, complete even if devoid of personality. All of these, I foresee receiving the Same Answer.  So we’ll skip to the end, shall we? 

There’s an irony in the fact that the question I would have kept until last is generally the first that is asked in any association.

“What’s your name?”

“ _That_ ,” she says, and you wouldn’t notice the tremor in her hand except that she is laying bacon into the pan and the rasher trembles, “is the _first_ thing I don’t remember.  And really, to be honest, I could care less about that.  Just so you know when you’re looking. _He’ll_ want to know it but I’m not bothered.  Whatever her name was, that’s not be anymore, and the names of angels are all ugly or… like, Tauriel sounds like hemorrhoid cream, so-”

“Amnesia?”

“I hardly know ya!” She grins, gives herself a little drum-spike with a spatula on the edge of a plate.  My expression, I assume, makes it clear that I’m unimpressed, because I don’t have to say a word before, “Oh, give me a break.  Do you have any idea how many times I’ve had to avoid that question?  Anyway, don’t you have to get a bang on the head for amnesia?”

“Not necessarily. What about drugs?”

“Never touch them.”

Her fixed gaze is momentarily less vacant. A powerful tool, that, when one is under interrogation, to have more to say and say nothing.  I’ll admit, there is a beat more of a pause than I would like before I move on.  “Well, if you don’t mind my asking, how does anyone come to _forget_ their own name?”

It _is_ too early in the morning.  Getting her permission in the beginning has made me overeager, made me come on too strong, and I feel her withdraw.  Nothing changes, not outwardly, but she becomes more cautious.  The pauses are longer.  She weighs her words now. _Stupid_ ; should be trying to relax her, build rapport, not driving her away.  But it’s this question; it _hurts_ , works at both of us with the burn of allergen, something caustic which must be removed.  How does anyone forget their name?

The blunter phrasing (see?, there was a blunter version, I softened it, chose the kind one), _How did Moriarty make you forget your name?_

If she stopped answering, it wouldn’t surprise me. She’d skip the question as though it was never asked, make breakfast, and sometime much later on we’d pick this up.  It is, in fact, more of a jolt to see her steel herself, a deep breath, the straightening of her shoulders.  For reasons I am not ashamed to be baffled by, she forces on a smile.  “I was on the street, before he found me.  He always says he pulled me out of a skip.  I like that.  Because you know when you pass a skip and you see something really nice and you wonder why anybody would ever throw something so lovely away?  I like being the nice thing.  Anyway, all that time, nobody was calling me by my name, were there?  So I think when I met him, that didn’t really feel like me anymore anyway.  And then we played a game…”

“What kind of game?”

“A game where I was the only girl about. So any woman’s name, that meant me.  And I’d be Amy for ten minutes and Magda for a day and so on and so forth.  And every so often then, he’d make me sit in a quiet room and think very hard and see if I could remember the name I started out with.  A memory game; _granny went to market and bought Amy, Magda, Grace, Lizzie, Laura, Leanne_ , so on… so forth…  Whatever I came up with was always wrong.  Y’know I’m sure I hit it once or twice but he could hardly have told me so.  Defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it…”

Misinformation.

Her name wasn’t taken from her but given, dozens of them, hundreds, over and over until to pick out just one, and one which hadn’t been terribly familiar to begin with, became an impossible task.

Think about it; does it fit?

A head full of names, all referring to one mannequin, all associated with the day on which they applied. A name is a personality, you know.  Change the name, change everything.  Change the name, live a whole new life.  Change a name and you’re not on the run anymore, not married anymore, not who you were the day before. 

One vulnerable girl – no, not vulnerable: _susceptible_ – tragic creature, lost, worn down, having absolutely nothing, and given _everything_ , all at once, a thousand times over.  Overwhelmed.  Think about it; one becomes thousands.  Thousands are untenable.  Thousands cannot be supported.   Does it fit?  Take a mind to the point of cracking, bursting at the seams with all the thousands, and then offer a simple explanation; _You are my angel_.  One became thousands, thousands became one.  Names upon names, girls upon girls, swept aside by the glorious, tidal relief of one word, _Angel_.

It fits, doesn’t it? How does anyone forget their own name?  Yes.  Yes, I think it fits.


	4. Chapter 4

Her condition is psychological. All of her conditions, I should say, given her obvious psychosis, the smothering of conscience, her illogical devotion to a madman, but I refer specifically to her memory loss. She as much as asserted this herself, when she refused to let it be called amnesia. The very kindest thing I have been able to do for her, from the day and hour she arrived on the doorstep, is doubt that. Short of a CT scan, I could have made no further attempt to prove that her fog was self imposed.

Direct questioning was doomed to failure – anything with a question mark received that Same Answer. I asked her, then, for impressions. Facts are hard and cold, a mind can hide facts when it doesn’t want to know. Impressions are more difficult to get rid of. They tint the colours of our vision and tingle beneath our tongues, the flavour which is gone before you can name it. With skill and concentration they can be ignored, but not removed, and this angel is not a creature that would ever seek to remove the personal taint from her worldview. What would that leave her with?

And so I asked, if she couldn’t remember the names of her parents, the makeup and membership of her childhood support group, what came into her head when she thought simply of _family_?

She said love, caring, nurturing, appreciation, cliché, truism, platitude, and thus I knew that she remembered nothing of ever existing within a family unit.

That offended her, I think. Certainly offence is the only explanation I can assign to her rampant overreaction. “Never mind,” I said, and yes, I was stopping her mid-sentence, but the sentence was sentimental and ridiculous and devoid of truth, I said, “We’ll try something else.” And like a little girl she straightened her back, lowered her head, narrowed her eyes at me as if she wanted them to burn through my skin.

“My family _now_ is that way. Alright so we’re a bit broke up at the moment, but any family has rough times-“ If she’d said that in her initial volley, I might have listened. Fact is, it didn’t come up until she was pushed, and it came in the context of _Him_ … “Me and my God,” she smiled when I asked what family she had, “And all his saints, my family; my Uncle Charlie and Uncle Angus and my Colonel and-“

“We’ll try something else,” I said. She seized, petulant. More than once, she seemed to think better of our association in its entirety; I am neither proud nor ashamed to admit that I have often been faced with someone who is seriously considering storming out of my presence never to return again. I know what it looks like. Generally they force themselves to remain because they really do need my help, and this may well have had something to do with the girl’s decision too (she really does want her birthday, some wild notion about presents waiting for her if she’ll only claim them, I wasn’t listening especially closely to that). But first and foremost, she has no choice.

Whether she wants to be here or not does not matter in the slightest. _He_ wants her to be here.

There was one more avenue; storytelling. And she does love to tell a story. I have edited a great deal of her chatter away in the interests of recording only what is essential to understanding her but please, trust me, take my word for it, she hasn’t shut up since she arrived. She talks endlessly without prompt, and I had the perfect prompt – that family of hers. Picture me, ever so apologetic, pandering to her. Me, desperate to show her how attentive I’d been, picking up the birthday conversation even though I’d hardly heard it, “What’s the nicest gift any of them ever gave you?”

A complete non-sequitur in the situation but that didn’t even cross her mind. Though she was still angry with me, she was intrigued, squirming, knowing her answer and only tormenting herself over whether or not to tell me. Still, despite her longing, this odd qualifier, “You mean like a thing, an actual, hold-it-in-your-hand present-type gift.” No question mark, only a confirmation; I nodded and she shook her head. “It’s stupid.”

“You have very little to offer; I’ll take stupid.”

“…It’s a tiger. A little stuffed one. I got it from Moran when the boss died. I thought he was trying to cheer me up but later I figured out it was just because he knew I wouldn’t see any of them for a bit. It was just nice having this warm soft thing that I could… I call him Popcorn, because I got him from a Colonel.” The weakest excuse for a laugh, spectral, faltering from her, “I told you it was stupid.”

“Of course not. Nothing strange about a childlike mind attaching too much significance to a stuffed animal. You’ve done it before, of course.”

And I saw it. I swear, it flared behind her gormless expression, lit the air between her parted lips, she _thought_. She reached back and there was something to find, something her fingertips just skimmed, something soft and warm that she grabbed for, something with a missing eye, perhaps, or a toddler’s teeth-marks on the tail. She found it, I promise you, and it was all she would have needed, like a single bootprint on a mountain beginning an avalanche, like the first pickaxe puncture that sends oil shooting skyward, she reached and she found and she could have been whole again. Grab for a forgotten toy and the forgotten rest will follow.

A little more _effort_ and she could have been whole again; at the last moment the light stuttered and died as she flinched away. Fear. Not uncommon. Prisoners don’t want to be released, hostages fall in love with their captors, black-eyed spouses cannot bring themselves to leave. Angels fight for God even when Lucifer is advocating self-worth, free will, choice and all those other modern miracles.

“I don’t remember.” The repetition of scripture, call-and-response, she mumbled her chorus again and sighed into palpable relief.

I could have pushed her. Ought to have. She’d come close and, given no time to regroup, would have gotten closer. I should have pushed her.

I thought about that CT scan, you know. She was up for it, too. I was in the act of texting Molly, not to coerce her into helping, just to find out who was off and which rooms on the appropriate corridor had their lights on or off, when I saw past the fractal glitter in the girl’s eyes. She was just excited. Something she hadn’t done before. Sneaking into a hospital to lie in one of those great big tubes under the direction of an amateur, though I am sure her range of experience exceeds that of most people of comparable age and skill, presumably is something very few people have done. One for the books, another bizarre little vignette to witter at unsuspecting (and, at that moment, deeply unwilling) benefactors.

So I gave up. Admitted it. She was right, had been from the beginning. Her limitations were entirely self-imposed, whole-heartedly pursued, and utterly unshakable. She delighted so in the implications of forgetting (namely that she would belong so much more completely to her master) that she has made an art of it.

Torture. I thought of that too. At the very height of a passionate agony she might be induced to scream the name of her first childhood pet to any more established gods that might be listening. Forced to beg for her life, she might offer up those secrets she claims even she doesn’t know.

Thought of it. Dismissed it. Obviously.

Thought of it twice, actually, but twice dismissed it. Obviously.

She cried. Ran off after the near-miss with the cuddly toy, in tears, an unprincipled pounding of feet up the second stairwell and shook the ceiling with throwing herself down on the bed. All very dramatic, all very little-girl of her. Meaningless, in the big picture, I was done with her anyway and glad of the quiet that succeeded her, but… In the interests of a full and complex picture of this bizarre new flatshare, I just feel it ought to be mentioned, she cried. And she didn’t come back. Stayed up there all yesterday evening and, unless she crept around while I slept, all last night. All this morning too; no breakfast today.

No breakfast, no company, so I left early. I took with me the only piece of her former life she let slip. In fact, it’s a part she does not seem to consider history at all. A mistake, then, in the making of an angel, vanity on God’s part – do you see it? You must. It’s the only thing she’s told me, apart from ‘I don’t remember’. You have to see this.

 _He’s always telling me he pulled me out of a skip_.

The _street_ , for God’s sake! No pun intended… He allowed her the memory of the filth and isolation immediately before his grace, his light, his love selected her from the ugly, shivering mass and raised her up to better and higher things. A mistake, yes, a mistake out of his vanity, out of needing her to worship him, needing to be the saviour. You don’t make _anything_ good by making a girl think she has always been the extra special chosen one. Arrogance and self-righteousness, perhaps, but nothing good. To elicit loyalty, subservience, absolute devotion, you must leave the fear of hell, the belief that she has already been there and could, at any moment, be flung screaming back into flaming perdition. God is nothing without the devil, the promise of heaven nothing without the threat of hell. I’ve dealt with fanatics and even the more mediocre (moderate) of the religious-deluded, and they all are born of crippling fear.

Or, well, _belief_ , you’re supposed to respect these things but… It’s the same thing, really, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Not good?

It doesn’t matter if it’s good or not. I had the first step into her former life, and I had her picture on my phone. I started it circulating right after she mentioned being plucked from the city debris, along with the promise of a reward for information. A vague and entirely unspecified reward, which may or may not turn out to be my eternal gratitude and a firm handshake, but you’d be surprised the power just that word can have. The only people who ever seem to ask are the ones who are willing to make up information, and I don’t want those people.

This morning, then, I went out to check on the progress of this golden rumour, to make sure it was seeping down and down into the right societal strata. And to make it move amongst those who might have seen her. If she remembers Adler’s faux-fatality, if she was already established at the left hand of God by then, if I have judged her age with any accuracy, she may well have been a teenage runaway. Those young girls, they don’t go unnoticed.

Please don’t mistake that for a comforting, affirming statement on the inherent goodness of humanity. Don’t be stupid.

A young woman alone and vulnerable and cold is noticed by a great many people.

That in mind, maybe you can imagine something of how I feel when I return. It is much, _much_ later. I’ve been out amongst all that for hours, actively pursuing the worst of it. Professional detachment can protect the mind, what ragged semblance of a heart might be admitted to, but it cannot keep the skin from creeping, the bones from rolling against one another as if to grind away the tension and discomfort. And there is some deeper, some unnamed place inside – you know it, I’m sure – it feels nothing, but it knows where you’ve been, and though you couldn’t give it a pinpoint location within your body you know when it is full and whether it is full of good or bad.

You can imagine, maybe, or can you?, something of what I feel upon opening the door and hearing Radio Two blaring from Mrs Hudson’s kitchen. And I can smell fresh baked biscuits.

You can imagine, can’t you? Or can you, because there is one other element of this warm and reassuring scene that I have not yet mentioned, which is that I can hear _more than one_ voice lifted in solemn chorus with Miss Parton’s wailing to her love-rival. One voice familiar, old, tuneful if a little cracked in places. The other tone-deaf, thick with the London I just left, bubbling with half-restrained laughter, the idiot joy of a lunatic.

They are dancing, you know. The small, shuffling way of people in kitchens, but without the awkwardness of strangers. I wonder how long she’s been down here, my houseguest. Certainly the dregs in the teacups on the table are dark enough to represent two pourings, maybe even three.

There is a bitten half of one biscuit left for me.

I mention that only to help you gauge just how much tea has been had, how much idle nibbling done, to leave the unlikely pair of them bogling gently to _Jolene_ , and with the baking bowl in front of them. Not just done with one batch, but moving on to another, thank you very much. That’s addiction, you know, when you replace something to disguise the fact that you polished it off. That’s people who top up vodka bottles with water, whiskey with weak black tea.

“I don’t know about this,” Mrs Hudson is saying, seemingly meaning a small saucepan she’s just taking off the hob.

“Promise,” the girl replies. “Cross my heart and kiss a pig. It’s the only thing different in my butter biscuit recipe to yours, and you said you wanted mine, so-“

“Right. Right, I’m going to do it. Right.”

And they both rattle with girlish delight at the sight of _molten_ butter being added to mix, rather than just softened. Scandalous. Having always been something of a fan of the existing recipe, this is the moment when curiosity demands that I pick up the half-biscuit they couldn’t finish and taste it.

This, finally, is when they notice I’ve arrived.

“Oh, hello, dear. Didn’t hear you come in,” and Mrs Hudson goes on, how I ought to have introduced my guest before now, how they’ve had, and I quote, _a lovely time_. Actually, verbatim, she says _a lovely time this morning_ , which given that it is now after two tells me how long the girl has been here without ever having to ask, but that is all put to one side, because I am looking only at my guest.

She knows she’s done wrong. Already she is arranging herself to leave, a shift from that high, joyful gear down to something more appropriate, something quiet and ashamed and recoiling from me.

Of course, there’s no unpleasantness. Not down here in 221a, not ever, not if I’ve got anything to do with it. It’s the strangest sensation, though; I know I twitch a smile, I know I say something polite. I am aware of inviting Moriarty’s angel away with me in a way which seems easy and bright and disguises well how utterly unequivocal the request is. But I don’t really hear it. If I you asked me I couldn’t tell you the words I used to do it. Aware, yes, but very distant, very removed. I think only that I want that girl to come now, now when I tell her, to be right by my side so that I might put my hand on her shoulder and that my fingers might bite beneath the bone of it, that she might squirm and try to pull away and be able to go nowhere. She, however, lingers a step or two behind, making her goodbye needlessly friendly. More tips about baking ingredients, perhaps, I don’t know, I don’t hear. I am halfway up the stairs before her feet fall into step behind me, rushing to catch up.

“What’s the matter? Did you find something out? You look like He does when I’m in trouble, have I done something, please?”

Before I answer her, I open the door of the flat and usher her inside. I make sure it is firmly closed. I make sure I am _aware_ enough to keep my voice soft. “Do not use my landlady.”

“… _Use_? No, no, Detective… You’ve got it wrong. I made the tea, that’s all.”

“Do not-“

“No, but I _didn’t_!” She is panicking now. Look at her. Look at the absolute terror in her eyes. She too is very distant from the two of us here talking. Crippling fear, as I said before; the angel is far away, cast down to perdition, all wrapped up in her fantasy of real life in all its horrors, the world that would be forced upon her if she were not the special little _angel_ … “I didn’t! I woke up and you weren’t here and I was bored so I baked and they were going to be for you but then I thought of Mrs Hudson and how I owe her an apology for when I was showing you my wings the other day and also for living in her house without ever saying hello and her hip was bad when I went down so I offered to make the tea for her because she couldn’t reach for the sugar so I made the tea and we talked and ate the biscuits and she said she can never get butter biscuits crumbly and I told her to melt the butter and you came back and that’s all, I promise, cross my heart and-“

“-And kiss a pig, yes, heard that delightful little colloquialism…”

Is she afraid because she doesn’t understand, or because I’ve caught her? Have I underestimated her in assuming that she poses no inherent threat? Has she _tricked_ me? Her madness is manufactured; the scope of her stupidity might have been manipulated too.

But I look into her vacant, dull eyes, and see nothing. Tear-gleam, cement grey, black and white, capillary red, salt-stung pink, but nothing one might call insight.

That level of concealment is real talent. That, or she’s telling the truth. And I cannot tell. Unfamiliar feeling. My skin is crawling again. I can’t tell.


	5. Chapter 5

Closer to lunchtime than any other morning, it seems we’re back on breakfast terms, the Angel and I. Having spent the bulk of last night back out in the city – some breeds of scum are nocturnal and can only be found after dark – I’m ready for it. I have, in fact, been up and ready for hours, have made a coffee or two whilst wondering if she would appear or not. Now in she comes, creeping like some monster that has to hide her face, thinking she is beneath my notice just because I’m unseen on the other side of a door. Like any morning she rattles around the bathroom for a bit, like every morning the same tuneless singing, like every morning the little padding steps that dance her to the kitchen and twirl around the table and swing her giggling around the door of the fridge. If you didn’t know she was mad you might mistake her for somebody terribly and perpetually happy… which is, arguably, much the same thing as mad, forget I said anything…

When something finally begins to smell good, I pick up some papers as if I’d been studying them all this time and walk out from the bedroom. “Oh. Good morning.”

She laughs, “Right. Like you didn’t know I was here. If you didn’t want to notice me, you wouldn’t.”

“Don’t be bloody clever, it doesn’t suit you.”

I don’t look up, but there’s a sting, a little flash of hot mistrust burning where her gaze bites at me. And yes, it was something of a cruelty to begin our day together. Believe me when I tell you it is only beginning, and by the end, by the fiery sunset, she will look back upon that opening volley as the rosy dawn it is. Believe me about that, trust me when I tell you she will undoubtedly give as good as she gets, and please, if you have any intelligence at all, assume that I have my reasons.

She recovers well from that first sting. The processes of cooking are helping. They give her something else to concentrate on, something at which she believes she is talented, something which she thinks I appreciate. It validates her. So that’s enough of that, then. Much as I’d like to let her finish, that has to stop.

The burner is on. She holds a pepper over it, stuck on the end of a toasting fork I didn’t know I owned and which I hope has been sterilized, blackening the skin. Another pepper, two tomatoes, all in similar states, are already cooking away on the stove. Shame to waste it all… But this process is more important. If breakfast supports her, if it’s a crutch she can lean on, she’ll have to starve. We’ll both have to bloody starve… “You’ve been shopping again.”

“It was Mrs Hudson, her hip still you know? I just stepped out to bring back milk but then I thought, well, I should do something special this morning because I didn’t yesterday and bec-“

“You’re using a scientific instrument to make… what _is_ that?”

The tone of my voice knits up her brow, makes her duck back behind her hair. The end of a strand threatens the lip of the pot, so with quick hands I gather it back, all of it, holding it tight at the back of her neck until she reaches up and stretches the elastic band off her wrist to tie it. No crutches, no hiding, and I want her knowing too that I am close, and making the decisions.

A flare of defiance, “I’m using a scientific instrument because of that fecking awful electric hob, you can’t char on it, so-“

“Asked you a question, dear.”

Defiance dies. You find that often, in creatures like this, like kittens taking a swing at birds too big for them, they try their little paws at swiping until they are pecked, and at that they bow their heads forever. “I do special eggs for the boss sometimes. Sort of spanishy-mexicany type eggs, and this is my sauce I invent for it. Because I know you were out late and you were working hard and-“

“Don’t bother,” I tell her, and believe me, trust me, it pains me to say, “Not hungry.”

Her hand shakes. You see it in the lapping flame at the side of the pepper. Not a tremor, but a tremble; not hurt, but enraged. “Well,” she mumbles, and shakes it off the fork into the pot, “ _I_ am.”

“Do you get to make that decision? At home, I mean. Not now, obviously. That you’re hungry? Surely that’s a choice. For someone of your inimitable skills of repression, surely. And you don’t make your own choices, do you?” She drops the fork clattering into the pot and starts to switch off hob, burner, lifts a bowl of beaten eggs towards the sink, “No, just a question; go ahead and eat.”

“I’m not even hungry.”

“You said you were, angel, go ahead and eat.”

That name, she flinches. First time I’ve used it. She goes on with what she began, pouring away the eggs, starting to rinse out the bowl before she turns around to face me. Narrow-eyed, studying me with her lip bitten in, ultimately she gives up trying to read or guess and simply asks, “What’re you doing?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You’re not right. You’re not being you. And if you’re trying to be Him, you’re doing it really badly.”

“Oh, that’s not something you need ever worry about - ”

“- Then what? - ”

“ – Believe me, angel, even your beloved god doesn’t want to be Him. His face, I’ll never forget it, when he stuck that gun in his m-“

Panic, she darts past me, “I don’t have to listen to this.” She rushes for the door, grabbing it open. But that’s not her decision today either. I’m there before she can leave, reaching across her to push it shut again. A moment longer she keeps tugging at the handle, straining like a little girl to run away.

I tell her, “I’m afraid you do, today.”

All her courage lifts her eyes again, and she hisses at me through her teeth, “He’s _alive_.”

“Unlike the rest of us. Sit down, Angel.”

This is an order, and she obeys. Our angel reacts very well to direct instruction, and to burning eyes, and to being made to feel how far she has pushed her rapidly dwindling luck. But she is celestial and I am no god she recognizes; she sits but she does it with her shoulders back, beginning to glitter, letting the shiny veneer of the poor little girl, the sweet pawn, slide away for the first since she arrived at my door. You might argue that shows weakness, that I’ve cracked her defences. You _might_ ; people argue a great many stupid things, they do it every day.

This is strength. We’re not playing House anymore. I have changed the game, and she has changed herself to be just as successful as she has ever been.

I will admit, it makes me hesitate. Only a moment, but not an opportunity for any clever knight to miss. Her glitter catches light, sparking from her, I know that feeling, it crackles in your skin, it is electric and you know that you are, if only momentarily, on top of the world, and she grins, “ _Art thou afeared?_ ”

Bizarre, from nowhere, she knows what she’s doing when she sends that chaos crackling over my brain, looking for the reference amongst a million others. She draws my unintentional pause out long until it breaks, “ _No, monster, not I.”_

“Oh, good, you got it! Uncle Charlie never did. He swore he knew it and not to tell him, so I didn’t, but he never got it. Miss Mies did, Auntie Penny did, never even asked the Colonel, Miss Adler and Miss Evelyn both did… You’re the first in forever, though. But now you have to tell me, do you think I’m a monster? Or were you just quoting to answer? And if you _do_ think I am a monster, do you think I am _his_ monster, as in made by him? Because that would make me more a Karloff than a Caliban, and then we wouldn’t be able to talk very much at all. Mostly I’d be able to grunt about friends and flowers. That would be about the size of it.”

“Frankenstein’s creature was incredibly eloquent,” I tell her. “You know that. Your copy is well-read.”

“Charity shop.”

“Coconut filled chocolate like you’ve been eating smeared on the sides, flakes of your nail polish between pages, your handwriting in every empty space, I think not.”

“You never answered me.”

“Forgive me; it was a terribly boring question.” A grunt of rage, her foot paws the floor and she gets up, wheels towards the window. “Sit down.”

“No!”

She stalks. She holds her head and paces the room, touching one inconsequential thing or another as if to prove they are still real, that she is still here. “You were nice to me,” she tells the punctuation of pencil tips on her palm, pressing it down on the holder, “What did I do? Or what are you doing? Or what did I do, it’s always me, but then again, that’s at home, isn’t it? And I’m not at home so maybe I didn’t do anything.” The minute rattle of fingers drawn over a keyboard too lightly to type, like claws on tile, blindly leading herself along the desk. “No. No, I can’t think of anything. Mrs Hudson! I was nice to Mrs Hudson? Or was I?”

The angel looks to me as if I’m going to tell her. Put her out of her misery. I’d like to. Honestly. I know you don’t believe it but you must; I’d like to put her at ease, admit everything, explain it all away, but it isn’t time yet. She looks at me pleading, a high-pitched keening from the back of her throat almost beyond human hearing. It’s the first time I’ve really seen her gone, mad. She has shown many times the cracks in her mind but here is the first moment I have seen through them, into the lunacy itself.

Break. She needs to break. All of this can end if she only breaks open.

Instead she growls again and toughens, rolls into another wave of rage and a spinning step across the room. She grabs the hanging wire of the headphones on the longhorn skull and lashes it slapped from the band, lashes out with it still trailing from her fist and flings over the music stand. Then she looks to me for a reaction. Believe me when I say I don’t want to, but I pick up the violin bow, resting against the armchair and, holding it underhand like a spear fire it javelin-like into her shoulder. She staggers back against the desk, holding it.

Not the first idea of a cry…

From downstairs, octaves high with timidity, Mrs Hudson calls, “Is everything al-?”

Both of us, perfect synchronicity, bellowing, “Fine!”, and both of us waiting in silence until slippered feet beat a retreat across the hallway.

We too retreat, though not so obviously. Both falling back, regrouping, assessing each other over again. This angel is still trying to figure out why she has so suddenly fallen from my grace, and has yet to arrive at the rather obvious conclusion that there is no reason at all. I could go into the psychology of this, her culture of blame, of _self_ -blame, of guilt, how she thinks of herself as the root of all worldly evil, so on and so forth, and so I would, if that were important right at this moment.

Fascinating, though. For instance, let me tell you what she does, and you may consider for yourself the thought process, the mindset, behind such action:

After a little while, the damning of my silence builds up on her. She would like to scream. She fights that admirably, and decides instead to focus her energies on efficiently sounding the depths of my anger. To this end, she throws up the sash on the window and sits idly on the sill. Still and wary at first, still growling and keening by turns. However, gradually those noises turn to more of her tone-deaf singing, and in time with a rhythm which is _all_ her own, she begins to rock. A tiny little movement at first, growing deeper and deeper until, in spite of myself, I call out, “Careful, Angel.”

A flash of sharp teeth, hope new sprung, thinking she’s got me.

“You’ll fall and break your neck,” I add. “Then however will you keep your appointment with your _boss_ …”

Punctured, she gets up and slams down the sash so hard the panes rattle.

“You’re worse than him,” she spits. Don’t ask me to comment on how I feel about it. That’s not relevant. The feeling itself is not relevant and my having it, then, is a terribly unscientific digression, so do not ask. “When he punishes me, I always know what I’ve done. Nearly always. Or what somebody else has done to make him angry and he needs to… Short version, right?, if he calls me scum I know he’s doing it to help me understand my place, not because he’s trying to make some kind of point.”

"Tell me about him."

"Call him and ask yourself...” I stare. “Well, obviously you found my phone the other night.  Wait, wait, you mean you didn't?"  

She's bluffing.  I check all possible details with myself - the bag, the jacket, no bulge anywhere in her clothing the day she came, no, she's bluffing, she didn't have a phone. And a silly bluff too; she may shake my faith in many things, ironically including any possibility of preternatural benevolence over the innocent, but not in myself.

The angel watches me dismiss her assertion. A breath of a laugh, and she rolls her bruising shoulder, wanting to waken up my doubts, “Yeah, he always said that was your problem..."  

"I didn't ask to be told about myself."  

"And self-absorbed too, he did mention self-absorbed..."

"You are testing my patience"  

"You're testing mine!  I'm not telling you about yourself, nothing you don't _hopefully_ know already, because to be _so_ pigheaded and _so_ selfish and _so_ arrogant, you really need to have noticed that at some point, don't you, mate?  I am _not_ telling you about yourself!"  

…Telling me about him.  Telling me what he thinks of me.  And, if she believes all those thoughts of his to be true, to have been proven to her here today, she is telling me how insightful he is, how perfectly he has me figured out.  Using me to talk about him.  Well, that can be a two-way street.  "Angel?"  A moment's grace; wary eyes, turning her shoulders towards me, the softening of her body language by increments, quick as a glacier.  "Get your wings out."  

She presents them to me in much the same way as she did before; she turns her back and gathers up her jumper at her back of her neck. But does it now without joy, with reluctance, as if I had asked her to undress. It is only slowly I step closer to her.

The damage is extensive.

For some reason that phrase sticks in my head, echoes. It is difficult to move beyond it, the repeating sound, like interference, like a migraine, the damage is extensive. I see no detail, no artistry, no meaning, nothing of what I am meant to, only that the damage, from first glance to last, is extensive.

Her face turned away, she won’t notice that my eyes shut for just a second, trying to fight past the black hole reverberating. “Tell me,” I say. Her voice will focus me. Her deluded version of the story will show me truths. “Come on. You knew you’d have to tell this story eventually.”

Lungs filled, emptied, filled again; she could be offended or overwhelmed. I learn very quickly which it is; she speaks in breathless rapture. Half-scripture, half-demented Kipling, _How the Angel got her Wings_ …

“They began as an accident.  You see the long top bone over my left shoulder?  I stumbled in the kitchen and he had a knife and I turned against his knife.  Silly accident.  It wasn't very deep or anything.  I went on with what I'd been doing, I think.  As far as I remember, I went on with... washing up, i think.  And that was how it started.  I thought it was just a cut but he knew better than that.  He sees through accidents, you know.  I suppose when you're so good at making bad things look like accidents you learn what to look for.  He sees through accidents and finds the usefulness in them.  To me it was just a cut but he saw the bone, and that was when he knew that I would have wings, and be an angel to him.  I was at the sink and he snuck up behind me with the salt...  To keep it open, y'know?  To harden the edges?  So that it wouldn't just heal over, because that would have been the proper tragedy.  Me spilling a bit of blood, so what?  I did that every other time i went running for him.  Blood was no sacrifice by then, it didn't mean anything.  But me healing over when there was the chance for me to become so much more, that would have been tragic.  Anyway, that was how it started.  After that it took about two months, all told, maybe a bit more.  A little bit every day.  I think he liked having something he could just gradually work on, no rush, just gentle and perfect and kind.  He liked watching me become better than I was.  Every day I felt less the useless little bint he pulled out of a skip and more the angel, more pristine, more His.  Honestly, I've never seen him so patient.  And all the _attention_... It was probably wrong of me, very bold and bolshy, to enjoy it as much as I did.  He was always at me, around me, changing dressings and cleaning and neatening edges.  He was so determined that they would be perfect.  That _I_ would be perfect.  I think he loved me more those few weeks than ever before or since.  You can't know how lovely it was..."  

This isn’t working. I was supposed to start thinking again, when she spoke. The last thing I was supposed to do was bloody listen to her. The last thing that should ever have happened is the fearful, disgusted tightening in my chest. One detail makes itself obvious at me but it is no lead-in to any more. It becomes the next obsession, all on its own – a little flutter, the twitch of a damaged nerve at the tip of a trailing scapular feather, a pucker at the edge of the flaying like a snagged thread.

Knowing nothing of my broken focus, or of the nagging question scratching to get in at the back of my skull, “I think I'd been with him less than a year, then.  I remember i was settled into my job and my place, but I was still a secret from his real friends.  It was the winter Miss Adler died, how long ago was that?"

Adler. The death, the trial run for later pretences, I have wondered more than once if that was about planting ideas in my head, you know, and that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the nagging question? That is the thought that will start me thinking again. "He did it?  No.  No, try again.  Try the truth this time, angel; who gave you wings? The cuts themselves, not the idea." He plants ideas. The actual act, no. No, that is far too close. That is too messy.

" _He_ did.  How dare you, the one thing I would never, ever lie about, the kindest thing anybody ever did for me-"

"Over taking you off the streets?"  

"That was him too, but yes, over that.  The next step after that.  Not just rescuing me, but turning me into something so much better, so-"  

"He did not scar you.  He did not draw blood from you.  Not with his own clean hands."  

"You're thinking of it as violence, detective-"  

Without a thought in my head I dart out the tip of a finger to jolt that ragged nerve. The angel cries out. She falters to her knees and the moment she has the wherewithal to forge words out of her pain she curses a plait of three languages, these tongues perhaps being something I should pay attention to, but I am leaning down to pick her up from the floor, telling her gently, "You hold yourself so carefully but sometimes you roll over in your sleep and wake up in agony-"  

"Unintentional!" she screams, "Side effect!  My wings were a gift, they never hurt, not for a second."  

"Not for a second."  

"Not one!"  

"You are a liar."  

"And you are a bastard, detective, because I don't think any of this helps you find out who I used to be.  Does it?  I'm going to die and you're more concerned with...  With _him_... Y'know when I put it like that, I can't really blame you..."  

Break. Didn’t I want her to break? Did I? Now that the time has come, and she has only crumbled, I don’t see how I ever could have. I had thought that, at her critical moment, she might turn on me. I had thought she might become vicious and attack, or that she might even give up on this entire venture and run home. Either would have told me that she came here with only ill intent, only to sow chaos, cause trouble, to spy. And now I find what I should have known all along; there was never enough of a girl _to_ break. There is only angel, and beneath it this loose, devoted, confused jelly that doesn’t even know its own name.

“Stand up,” I tell her, and she does, but only to storm from the flat, only to hide upstairs.


	6. Chapter 6

Forgive me my insensitive phrasing, but this inherited housepet of mine sleeps like she’s already dead. Proximity to her chosen end has nothing to do with it; it’s just another one of her talents.  And yes, believe it or not, to sleep is talent too.  As someone who never quite caught the knack, take it from me.  To sleep is talent; in severe emotional distress, through reverberating pain, against hunger and the elements and illness, to sleep is an immense boon to those who possess the gift, the one form of regeneration that requires _nothing_ of you. _Nothing_. _Nothing_ is where most people run into trouble.  They ache, toss, turn, worry, stare at the ceiling, they do a thousand things which prevent their disappearance out of consciousness into the perfect dark and the subtle release of dreaming where all the complications get laid out in their blueprint two-dimensions.  Bloody hell, dreaming, God help me, I miss it sometimes…  The other thing people do is let their mind chase itself along possibilities and observations as they do in their every waking moment, a state of mind which, it naturally follows, is not conducive to leaving those waking moments behind, but then again you get so much accomplished as you lie in the dark and silence alone without interruption, it’s hard to hold it against yourself.  Until you have to get up again, that is…  Like that raging hangover promise, _I’ll never drink again_ , which only ever lasts until the next, _I need a drink_.

Forgive me, too, if I digress, but you see I have never thought before now about the job description of a kept lunatic. _A live-in one_ , sometimes I hear that phrase in my head, in the voice that it naturally demands, and I flinch.  But I am standing now by that bed, in that upstairs room, and she is lying there utterly removed from her pains and situation with a plush tiger clutched up beneath her chin, and the Desired and Required lists are filling up. 

 _Able to sleep on a clothesline_ , that _must_ fall under Required.

Forgive me if I watch the covers near the footboard, to see if she paws, if down in her dreams she is chasing rabbits. I don’t mean any cruelty by it.  I don’t mean to compare her to an animal; that comparison makes itself, it doesn’t need my input, instinct.  My gaze slipped over there before I knew where it was going.

You hear it in the myths, you know. Alongside the princess who slept for a hundred years and the one with the uncomfortable mattress, the old man on the hillside, all those world-renowned tales, the local legend of the Angel is full of Endymion lacunae.  Found asleep upright in a narrow doorway waiting to make an exchange with a fellow runner.  Found asleep in the boot of an MI5 Mercedes and never admitted how she got there.  Found asleep on the concrete edge of a reservoir, a half-inch’s roll away from falling a hundred feet and breaking her back on a surface a swan dive would scythe open. 

Found asleep in the bushes at the end of the vast garden of a vast home out in Richmond, saying at first that she was enjoying the summer night, then coming clean and admitting that her ‘uncle’ had locked her out.

I heard that last story from my brother, you know.

I am just approaching, through that story and several others, an unnerving conclusion, that perhaps I am the last to meet her, when she stirs. Unwillingly, she becomes aware of my presence, and tries so very hard to ignore it.  Honestly, though she barely moves except by tics and twitches, I’ve rarely seen anyone fight so hard to hold on to ignorance.  Generally it comes naturally to most people.  To her, the knowledge is there, is felt and observed, it is too late, and still she claws, like a wounded animal, trying to frighten it off. 

I’ll leave. I didn’t come up here to look at her anyway, or to muse on the relative merits of states of consciousness.  I’ll leave.  Quickly I grab up her hairbrush, on the floor by the bed where she has kicked it off the covers in the night, and pull a few hairs from the matted cushion.  I’ll leave, but as I straighten to go my foot catches the strap of her holdall and drags it just a little across the floor.

The first real noise of the morning. Ignorance is no longer an option.  She snaps to attention like one in mortal danger.  Waking is the work of one pristine moment, without thought or understanding.  Her arms are raised to protect her chest and neck, her head lowered in what is either a show of deference or, judging by the fact that her eyes are up and alert and take in the room before settling on me, to prevent her nose from getting broken. 

This isn’t talent but skill; this is learned behaviour.

One further instant and I am studied, assessed, dismissed. The incongruous detail of me – the hairbrush in my hand – is read.  Red Alert falters back to Just Awake.  Like watching liquid drain away, all that activity, that instantaneous terror, just vanishes.  It leaves her grey and yawning, gathering the covers up from around her waist.  “You are fucking kidding me,” is how she greets the morning, fumbling around for the tiger she dropped in the phosphorus flash of waking.  “Apparently he’s actually helping…”

“Always my intention,” as I wrap her hair around two fingers, just to keep it neat.

“My huge, smelly bollocks it was…”

She looks around the room as if she’s never seen it before. Which is ridiculous; she saw it in every adrenaline-sharp detail the moment she opened her eyes.  Now she doesn’t recognize it. _This is not mine_ , sleep slows her thoughts enough to make them obvious, _this is not where I live_.  And as it all comes back to her she purses her lips with distaste, rubs her eyes while she tucks up her feet, making herself harmless again, making herself small.  She sounds it, too, sounds small when she mumbles, “I don’t understand.”

“I had to press you. To know-“

“To know if I was honest but not that hard. And you didn’t have to talk about H-“

“Of course I did.”

“You didn’t. You didn’t.  You’re a bastard and you didn’t need to stick your bloody finger in my back to make me explain the wings, I was already telling you the story.  You weren’t even looking for me.  And I knew that.  You were looking for him, and I let you because I didn’t know why you were doing it.  And I assumed, right, and bear in mind what you do when you assume something, when you _assume_ you make the pair of us look like twats, but I _assumed_ , you being all clever and all, that there was a connection and that if I’d asked you would have told me that the quickest route between two points is not necessarily a straight line.  But that was a load of crap, wasn’t it?  You’re a bastard.”

A fair point. Crudely made, yes, but still fair.  I pace away a step or two, lean on the sun-bleached edge of the table the TV used to keep dark.  There’s a sort of stillness to the morning, an amniotic orange.  Even her swearing is soft and resigned, prepared to go unheard but demanding to be spoken.  Looking not at her but out the window, “If you’d said that yesterday we might have shaved an hour off the riot.”

“You loved it.”

“Mrs Hudson didn’t.”

The scratch of her wriggling up straight amongst the sheets, a snake-like rolling of her shoulders, narrow eyes on me and the purr on her voice, “ _Oooh_ , did the big mean detective get bollocked by the little landlady?”

“… _Shame on you, making that girl cry_ , _never heard such a fuss in this house_ , all that business.  Few complaints about the noise thrown in for good measure.”

The girl in question giggles with pleasure. But, and perhaps this is just the morning’s ear-bashing tainting my perspective, it doesn’t sound like those tears are a thousand miles away.  She really is exhausting, you know; everything she does is beyond a layer of repression, beyond a layer of carefulness undoubtedly induced by fear of her beloved Boss, beyond the layer, the _filter_ , of her insanity and beneath that she’s got all those hundreds of talents and skills behind which she might be hiding the facts and truth of her life and how she is feeling.  All I mean, if she hadn’t wanted to cry and be heard crying, she wouldn’t have. 

A rare example of the method in madness – in her, there is no such thing as wild abandon. Her living circumstances have forced her to calculate her every breath, primarily with the aim of being inoffensive, but more generally to match her momentary situation. 

In short, she overthinks. Too much, certainly, to be caught weeping. 

In short and to give an example, she is watching the motes of dust move in the light that cuts around my shadow as if, given half a chance or a direct order to do so, she would attempt to count them. I am afraid if you do not understand or empathise with that impulse, then you ought not be privy to what goes on in these rooms.

“But you believe me now,” she says after a while. It jumps us back to the part of the conversation that bore no resemblance to an argument.  “You believe that I’m totally doomed and I need your help to sort things out before I die.  I can’t do it on my own and Mr Moriarty won’t help me because He wants you to do it.  So I need you.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re actually helping now.”

Showing her the reddish band, wound so tight around my fingers the skin above them is webbed with broken capillaries, “Yes.”

Yawning, one hand grabbing the pillow out of the compressed crater she left behind, “So can I go back to sleep now?”

“…If you want.”

So she arranges herself to do just that, straightening out again, coiling down onto her belly, hugging the pillow. “I’m not being lazy,” she mumbles.  “I’m not going to loaf just because you believe me now.  Will you be back for lunch?”

“Probably.

“I’ll make lunch.”

“What did you try to make yesterday?”

“No. That was for special.  You ruined that.  But I will make something nice.”

By now, she is horizontal. She mumbles on, but the mattress muffles her beyond the intelligible, and I assume she has very little left to say anyway.  Her point, after all, is already made; ‘I have done enough for now, go and catch up’.  I leave her, noticing from the doorway that her breathing is already settling back into slow rhythm.  Apparently she wasn’t finished charging when I interrupted. 

There is only one quick stop to make on my way out, back in the flat. I’m pawing through a drawer for some little bag or pot to put the hair in.  Looks a little more professional when you pass it over.  It attracts fewer suspicious looks.  Ridiculous, of course; that one can make it look like a scientifically collected specimen should be _in no way_ reassuring to so-called ‘genuine’ law-enforcement personnel.  But this is already a considerably awkward case, particularly in the suspicious look department, so on this one occasion, yes, I’m making the effort.  It serves me to make the effort so, painful or not, I’m making it. 

This just accomplished, about to leave, everything about to be fine, the door opens downstairs.

He’s early. Then I glance at my watch and find, no, in fact, I am running late.  How long did I linger upstairs?  Did I look once for the mutt-like twitches in her feet, or twice?  More?

It hardly matters. The upshot is, Mrs Hudson is chirping, “Morning!” down there, and then comes the rumble of a reply, too low to hold the shape of words up through the floorboards but the sound is him.  If I didn’t already know him by the arrival and the time and the opening of the door and the military spacing of his steps, I’d know him by that. 

First, I attempt simple escape.

Drawn by tea, maybe, the shapes and voices are lingering down at the kitchen door. If I can slip downstairs and out the door, the plan doesn’t need to change.  I’ll be gone before he knows it, Mrs Hudson will assume she missed something like ordinary people so often do, all will be well.  He’s got a text, after all.  It tells him everything he _immediately_ needs to know, and I’ll be back soon enough to fill him in on the rest so –

Two stairs and John backs up a step or two from the kitchen. Showing me his phone like I didn’t know he bloody had one…  “Been a while since I got a cryptic message from you.”

“You’re early,” I say, forgetting for a moment that he isn’t really.

He doesn’t correct me on it either, but notes my coat and, “Are we going somewhere?”

“Me, I am, briefly, need you to stay here. Message should-“

“Yeah,” and oh, here it bloody comes, here’s the second-guessing, he’ll accept the insult to his time-keeping because he’s already got an insult of his own planned, ladies and gentlemen, here, for the seventy-second time in a long and fruitful association, John Watson is about to ask me if I have lost my mind. Not in so many words, of course, that would be gauche and offensive and, oh, what’s the word, the word of it, tip of my tongue – _honest_ , but he is.  Wait and see.  Wait and see, and he opens that message to read from it, “ _Make sure she doesn’t leave. Explain when I see you_.”

Pretty clear, I should think. Wouldn’t you say that was rather unequivocal?  And look, we’ve even got Mrs Hudson here to say, “You don’t mean-?” and point up at the top floor, just in case the feminine pronoun and the nature of the instruction weren’t enough to tell a former army officer precisely what is required of him.

You know, it is perhaps unfair to involve her in the argument when she’s sleeping oblivious, but if I’d sent that message to the girl she wouldn’t have questioned it. She would have gone about it and trusted she’d see me soon enough and I’d tell her all she desired to know.  And _she_ would have turned up at the appointed bloody time, no, wait, he _did_ , didn’t he, damn him…

“Client,” I say. “Sort of.”  My steps, taking me gently, almost imperceptibly, back toward the door.

Not imperceptible enough, though, “Sherlock, don’t.”

“Well, not really a client. Charity work, really.  She’s not going anywhere anyway, she’s dead to the world.  Your old room-“

“-My wh-?”

“She won’t come down. If she does, let her cook, she likes that.  Like a mouse, really, don’t bother her, she won’t bother you, but John, do make sure she stays here, it’s very important she stays here.  Couple of hours.  No time at all.”

“Sherlock, where are you g-?”

Please don’t think I _like_ answering him with the slamming of the door.  But it’s easier for all involved if John knows as little as possible right now.  He was supposed to arrive and find me gone, and preferably the girl already up and around.  She could have made the tea.  He’ll see the burner and look right past it, not realize that it has become a more than reasonable replacement for the kettle.  I would not have been there to broker any questioning between them.  He, not wanting to tell her he’d been asked to babysit, wouldn’t have asked who she was or where she came from, and she being of passable intelligence wouldn’t have offered the information.

With me there, even in the hallway, all bets were off. There are certain questions which come in a certain order with the regularity and predictability of months following each other through the year.  January, who.  February, why.  March, in this case, would have been, _where did she come from_?

And the next couple of hours will be much, _much_ easier on John if he does not have that particular answer. 


	7. Chapter 7

Arriving home I try the front door and find it firmly locked. Damn; John must have found out who she is, somehow.  Odd, actually, I had been so certain of the questions that might asked and the sort of answers given, that he would have minimal patience for her madness and opt very quickly to withdraw rather than prod and, more than this, that even if they should somehow stumble into a dangerous conversation he’d be so polite and she’d be so coy that at any rate they should not have had time to claw each other’s eyes out just yet.

But the front door is locked. It’s between the hours of three and five, when that channel right on the edge between terrestrial and satellite, as venerable as the four beneath it and as trashy as the four hundred above, shows the TV movie every afternoon.  Mrs Hudson wouldn’t be out unless something had driven her.  In the past it has taken police raids, gun shots and the smell of searing flesh.  Don’t ask.  I only mention it to give some indication of what I might be facing on the other side of the door. 

It wouldn’t normally take me so long to find a key in my coat either. The beginnings of suspicion, that the girl comes and goes as she pleases, that she must have brushed by me in the street some day, that… but then it drops cold against my fingers out of a twist in a pocket lining and I remember, it’s probably not helpful to think of her that way.

John is a good man. One could almost adopt the girl’s talent for emphasis and call him a Good Man. Archetypal, in a way, a checklist of attributes, boxes ticked.  You see now, why I’m worried, don’t you?  Don’t you?  Oh, for God’s sake… The trouble with Good Men is that one of those boxes inevitably states, _adapts to given situation_.   And then your checklist goes out the window, because all you want him to do is react appropriately.  Loyalty, gentility, intelligence, sensitivity, there is no point in the list at all, because you desire only whatever is _necessary_.  Now you are following.  Now you are starting to see why I worry, why, when I open the door and step into nothing but pristine silence, into a stillness unbroken by so much as a human breath in a _long_ time, I am still trying to figure out what I did wrong.  I am counting through the words I said before I left and asking what I could have possibly given away.  Because the necessities of keeping an unknown young woman in a flat for a couple of hours are _entirely different_ to those of ensuring the cooperation and complicity of a captured enemy. 

Please don’t make me explain why I’m resorting to military jargon.

So intent am I on figuring out what possible flashpoint I allowed, that I forget about the seventh stair. Weak at one end of the tread rather than the middle, it doesn’t creak but buckles, a dull thunk which is more felt through the foot than heard.  But in silence like this, in the alertness of constant terror like hers, it’s enough for the girl.  The leathery stipple of persistently bare feet comes scuttling to the upstairs door.  But there’s one long, lunging step that comes heavier; by the time the door opens, John is an inch behind her grabbing for the neck of her t-shirt.  She escapes him by a hair and comes directly to me.  Still in her pyjamas, hair unbrushed.  Standing on the very next stair, I can feel her ragged breath, watch it knitted into sound by those spidery hands, all before I ever hear it.  Soft as prayer, urgent and clipped as machine gun fire, “I just want you to know it wasn’t anybody’s fault and I know what you tried to do keeping it secret who I was and I totally appreciated that.  It would have worked too, only, see, me and him?  We’ve sort of met before, a bit?”

…Yes, that would do it. That would have rather shot my silly little ruse in the foot.  Damn.

From up above, “Sherlock. A word?”

The girl tries to skirt around me. I see her throw one brief glance at the door but it’s not serious.  The downstairs kitchen, maybe, she seemed to like that before, or maybe she’ll burrow away in the basement flat, but she wants to run.  Which is exactly what I wanted to avoid.  I could have asked anybody to watch over her but I didn’t.  I asked a Good Man -  oh, look she’s got me at the capitals now, but _it makes my point_ – who should have known enough to be good to her.

As she tries to slip away, I reach right across and grab her far shoulder. Her own momentum turns her.  Because I keep hold, because I am continuing upstairs, because she is well trained, she does not need to be pushed to go a step ahead of me.

Back at the door of the flat, John backs warily out of the doorway. The moment we’re back inside all exit is slammed sealed behind us, too loud a noise not to flinch, too loud to ignore as much as I might want to.  It’s one of those nasty little moments where to throw a glance at him ought to be enough; certainly he expects it to be so when the glance is thrown in the opposite direction.  But I find that his glare is too intently fixed on her for me even to push in at the edges.  Most annoying, you know.  Not very polite of him, and more to the point, not very Good.  He should know better.  If _I_ can see that he’s out of line, and after all he’s the bloody one who has fought so hard to make sure I know what the line looks like, John ought to know better.

Not very battlefield-appropriate either, to become so focussed on the enemy that you can’t see a warning from your own side.

The girl cracks under that gaze, and though she keeps step she spins towards me, gabbling, “I tried to be nice, I really did, but you’ve been gone ages and I know I said bad things but I was angry and he’s been-“

“Shut up,” and she does, “Sit down,” and she pulls out the chair at the desk and plops out of the air like a feather pillow, hands pressed between her knees, looking quite as utterly dejected as she must have when she was first found in that skip she likes to imagine. John seems to approve of my attitude.  He needn’t; I’m about to turn it on him.

The wave of a hand from one to the other, giving them their formal introduction, “Soldier; soldier.”

And while John’s instinctual reaction is to take offence, _Don’t dare compare what she did with blah blah bloody blah_ , the girl’s is more immediate, more visceral – _she_ hears ‘Soldier, soldier’ and instantly carries on, “ _Will you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum?_ ” Then she catches herself and claps her hands to her mouth, burning crimson. 

“Ooh, isn’t she menacing… Now.  I hear you two know each other?”

The girl shakes her head, so hard I fear what’s left of her mind rattling around inside. “ _Don’t_ -“ John barks, then he catches himself too, and, just as she did, immediately quietens, growling, “Don’t start pretending now.  You had plenty to say before.”  To me, over her still swivelling head, “That night, the pool –“ Some people get more eloquent when enraged, John’s not one of them.  He’s even reduced to _pointing_ , those vile little stabs of the finger I’m more used to seeing from suspects who are always so keen to direct attention away from themselves.  “ _That_ was there.”

“No one happened to say her name, did they?”

Whether because John wouldn’t even give her a gendered pronoun, or because she’s scared he might answer my question out loud, the girl jams the heels of her hands against her ears, balling up still further, head practically between her knees. If you listen very carefully, and you’re not bellowing at the poor mad thing, you can hear that under her breath she is continuing the song, humming her way through the endless verses of sartorial swindle between the soldier and his hopeful fiancée. 

Maybe what I say next, I really mean. Maybe it is what I have had in mind from the very beginning, and I have never wavered in my resolve.  Maybe I say it for John’s benefit.  Mumbling outside our guest’s defensive bubble, “Just think, just for a moment, of what she knows and what could be done if she _liked_ one or both of us, hm?”

But he still won’t look away from her. Watching him, you see the sense penetrate, you see him accept what I’m saying (whether I believe it or not is still unknown and does not matter), maybe even like the idea, but it is smaller than his anger.  It doesn’t matter if it is true or if he agrees or if it is gospel come down from some infallible consciousness.  Nothing can ever become of it, not in John’s mind.  It is swallowed whole, instantly, and disappears into the raging heat.  “It’s not worth it,” still growling, and it is a long, long time since I’ve seen him like this.

I’m just starting to think I should perhaps get him to leave, when the singing stops down below and she says instead, “It doesn’t count.” Hands still over her ears, she is talking only to herself, “I was never supposed to be there so it doesn’t count and nobody was ever supposed to see me.  The Colonel was there and he didn’t know about me yet so nobody was supposed to see me.  And nobody really did so I wasn’t there.  I wasn’t there.”

Quieter yet, finally calm enough to explain, “The jacket, that bomb, she… she brought it. _Late_.  I wasn’t completely awake yet but I kept hearing the word late, him telling her she was late.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” she cries, jerking upright. In her own new rage, in pure frustration, her hands splay, seized tight, swiping down from the sides of her head, up again and again down where she snatches the edges of the chair to keep them still.  “It was Mr Sh… The man who made it, he’d been stupid, he put the detonator on and there wasn’t supposed to be, and _I_ knew that, and _I_ saw that, and _I_ told him to fix it and-“

“No,” John says.

“And that’s – _Yes_! – why I was late, it wasn’t my fault.”

He calls her a liar and for once I’m inclined to agree. “There was a detonator,” I tell her.  “I saw it.”

“It was still attached, but it wasn’t wired. You were the one couldn’t imagine Him with blood on his hands, detective.  He never wanted it to be messy when he was there in the room, and he knew he’d never have to _actually_ blow it up, not with the Colonel there with his gun, but it had to tie in with the other games before it so that you’d believe, and because that was just the art anyway, but there was never supposed to be a…”  You hear it in the way she trails off, and you see it in her eyes, the gaze turned inward; some little voice at the back of her mind, some real girl that probably used to have a name, has been screaming for her to shut up.  At this she finally hears it and balls up again, cold and tight, this time with her arms wrapped around her head entirely, “I shouldn’t be telling you this.  This is personal.  He’s going to kill me.”

“He’s going to do that anyway.” It’s the kindest thing I can think to say.  It gives her back her God and the certainty of her promised end.  I take her by the elbow and guide her to her feet, back towards the door.  She trembles, walks like one recovering from a long illness.  “Wait downstairs.  Mrs Hudson’s out, but she won’t mind.”

“Yes, sir,” she mumbles. Corrects herself, “Detective, I mean, not sir, obviously, detective…”

I close the door behind her when she’s out. More softly, this time, but I imagine she still jumps, because though she is three or four stairs down by then, that is the moment she chooses to start keening to herself.

“What did you mean, kill her anyway?” John asks as I turn.

“What I said. I suppose you’ve realized now, she’s quite insane.  That’s why she’s here, really.”  I wait for the inevitable joke but John seems to think it’s not the time.  On reflection, I find I agree and proceed to tell him the rest of that.  Well, perhaps not the whole rest, not the truth and nothing but, but enough.  Enough that he understands the depth of the disturbance and concludes, as I imagine most people would, that the girl perhaps ought not be held entirely accountable for her actions.  Her mind is not her own; why should her body be considered so. 

“That’s where I’ve been,” I say on my way to the Bunsen for coffee. “Scotland Yard.  You know, it can take months to get DNA results in a non-priority situation, and aside from terrorism and serial killers very little is considered priority at all.  I’ve had a creative afternoon.”

“And?” Of course he asks, he has to ask, but you can still hear a touch of reluctance, the part of him that would still see her thrown live and bleeding into the shark tank at the London Aquarium.  You can’t blame him for that.  Forgiveness is a terrifically difficult thing.  Look at my brother and I.  Can’t even remember what started that…   “Did you find out who she is?”

“…Yes.”

“Well? Come on, Sherlock, I’ve been stuck here clueless all day.”

“I think it would be a little unfair to tell you before I’ve discussed it with the concerned party. Or would it?  You’re better versed in these things than I am.”


	8. Chapter 8

Context is everything. People read a little differently when you get to know them.  Not significantly, not enough to invalidate earlier assertions, but context lends nuance.  For instance, I have commented before on those aspects of my guest’s character which might be viewed as childish.  And finding her sitting in front of Mrs Hudson’s television, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the rug, once more I might say that she looks like a little girl.  But with context you notice that she shifts, that she is not entirely comfortable.  Then you see all those cushions and blankets piled about, any one of which she could have grabbed, and nuance kicks in; she sits in the middle of the floor because she doesn’t want to disturb anything. 

The moment she becomes aware of me she mutes the television. Hopping up onto her knees, a forced giggle, “I heard a story,” she says, “That you can do this.”  Pointing back and forth between two of the talk-show guests, “He says he’s slept with her and she says he hasn’t, who’s lying, please?”

Half a glance, “Him… No, wait, both of them; he hasn’t slept with her but she habitually drinks so much she can’t actually be sure, he’s counting on that, the host already knows, they’ll bring that out before the next ad break and she’s got no defence, so… You heard a story?”

The girl hangs her head. In fact she undoes her ponytail so that her hair will fall forward, so that she can hide.  She mumbles something that ends in “…blog.”

“Oh… John didn’t-“

“-No, I get it. Totally understandable, I’d have been very angry too.  And you weren’t to know he’d seen me before.  The boss introduced me, or… I don’t know what you’d call it.  Like he was showing me what he’d caught.  He brought me in to Doctor Watson, that’s all.  Only for a second.  Then I had to get away before anybody saw me so…  I’m really sorry.”  That last makes no sense.  It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her so, with my usual distaste for non-sequitur and those things which are said without thought and meaning, but I stop.  A pause of a moment and she tells me what I don’t understand; “I know you probably didn’t want to have to explain me.”

“He would have found out sooner or later. Of course, I would have preferred to _lie_ but-“ 

She laughs and turns back to the television. “So he definitely hasn’t done her, then?”

“No, but as I said, she can’t know that.”

“What about when the child’s DNA test comes back?” _It already has_ , again, words that are at my lips before I manage to restrain them, but it’s still too close.  Somehow, she hears them anyway, and knows exactly what I mean.  This time the TV is switched off entirely, and she turns so quickly that her legs slide from beneath her in an ugly tangle, “You found something?”

The next thing I come to the edge of saying, _No_.

I hadn’t thought about telling her. Why would I?  When have I ever had to think about the telling of information after I’ve gotten it?  Usually the information has some other purpose.  Gain it, apply it, move along, delete it.  This is different and, though I am aware this may come across as somewhat ridiculous, even as a frankly stupid oversight on my part, I had considered _nothing_ of the mechanics of having somebody waiting for answers.  She hasn’t blinked since she asked me.  Only now, in the face of my hesitation does she falter, dip her head again.  “I’m sorry, I jumped the gun.”

“Stop apologizing. Say I _had_ learned something; what do you want to know?”

“How old am I?” I hadn’t even finished speaking.  “I try to guess by how I look but I’m not a very good judge and you never really know for sure, do you?  Some people look really old and they’re not, and the other way round, like I saw this thing online how Keanu Reeves has looked the same since probably, like, the French Revolution or something, and… I’m gabbling, I’m sorry.”

 _Stop apologizing_ , but sitting here with her staring at me, I feel the pressure of having what she desires, wants more than she can even admit to herself, and the pressure of knowing that everything she currently is might be broken if her original self is given suddenly back.  I can’t snap at her.

“You’re older than you look.”

“ _Yes_.”

“You’re twenty-two.”

A little smile, mind drifting while she assimilates this. One tiny hook to hang her personality on, you’d be surprised how quickly it takes effect; almost immediately she corrects the knot of her legs, draws up her knees into what she imagines is a more mature pose.  Then again she has never been less than perfectly adaptable. 

“That means you got my birthday.”

She’ll shatter. She knows that.  That is the only possible reason why she would not have asked, first and foremost, without thinking, for her name.  Given back her name she ceases to be the Angel.  Ceasing to be the Angel, she loses her connection without the only person who ever gave her purpose.  Who knows what else we could lose, both of us.  I tell you this, not to embarrass her, not to make a point, _again_ , of her madness, but so you’ll understand what suddenly brings out the mercenary in me.  “If I give you your birthday, you give me the details of your pending demise.  Everything you know.”

“Oh yeah! I’m supposed to give you that at some point anyway, might as well be now.”

“You could have mentioned that sooner… Alright, well, it’ll take a day or two for a paper report to come through so you’ll just have to believe me about this.  It’s April first.”

She doesn’t take so kindly to that as to her age. She accepts, believes – it is a truth too cruel to be anyone’s idea of a joke – but she doesn’t like it, and I have a feeling that this is one fragment of her former self which is immediately and hastily shoved back into the box from which I have just freed it, back into the dark never to be known again.  Too cruel a truth, that so cruel a life began on April Fool’s Day.  She seems almost grateful to move on to its rapidly approaching end.

“My turn,” she begins, without even a word of thanks for the birthday she was so excited about, quite as though I’d offered nothing at all. “I’m warning you now, though, I don’t know where or the exact time.  But I will be burned.  He says it depends how I feel on the night, but probably alive and conscious.  I’m going to do that. For him, because it’s what he wants, it’s how he wants the scene to be, is with me alive and conscious, so I will.  He didn’t totally believe me when I said that, though, kept telling me it’ll be alright if it’s not what I want, come the hour.  But it is what I want.  I want it to be perfect for him.  We talked about it.  No mercy blow, he was very clear on that, once I’m in flames I stay that way ‘til I’m properly Salem’d.  And wherever it ends up, he’s leaving me there, it’s where I’ll be found.  What else, what else did he tell me, we talked for hours and now I can’t remember…”

She goes on coaxing herself, coming up with little more than a few cold comforts, how she’ll suffocate before she ever gets a chance to burn to death, how she wishes there was something she could do to lose her voice and be unable to scream. I’ll admit, I’m really not listening anymore.  She talks about herself like some inanimate object, like an old coat.  Cheerfully, without hesitation or fear, she imagines herself being doused in accelerant and set alight, not so much as a tremor in her voice. _This_ is her welcome distraction from the ugly birthday.  As if she were to attend a bonfire, rather than be one.

Long after I have stopped wanting to know _anything_ about the stomach-turning enterprise, I let her go on talking.  Just to see if there’s a breaking point.  Just to see if, at any point, she will hear her own words and realize how they sound.

Never. Not once.  No single flicker of doubt ever dims her enthusiasm, even for a moment.

Oh, there’s a break, of course there is. There’s a part of the diatribe where her eyes start to gleam.  But it takes an impossibly long time to come and comes in the wake of a most unexpected thought, nothing to do with searing agony at all.  Again and again, “I want it all to be right for him, y’know?” and now, this once, she continues on and, even without my validation or wanting to know, tells me why.  “Because obviously I haven’t done enough.  I should never have let him go and be dead, detective.  There was nothing I _could_ do, but I shouldn’t have let him, and I definitely shouldn’t have helped him, because he’s not himself anymore.  He’s forgotten everything.  He’s so cruel now and he doesn’t even seem to realize.  And I’ve been trying to help him remember but at the end of it all he still knows best and I still have to do as I’m told.  It’s so strange now.  No one’s happy anymore.  The Colonel came round with a gun one night, not that he used it but that’s hardly the point, and Miss Mies got so scared she set a bomb for him, but…  But I’ve been right there the whole time.  If anybody should have done more, it’s… It’s obviously me…”

I don’t know what to say. Anybody with a snide joke to make about that, and I am sure there are more than a few, kindly keep them to yourselves.  I wouldn’t know what to say if she were talking about some loving, caring blood relative she couldn’t help.  Factor in where she has _actually_ come from and I could quite contentedly hold this particular silence for an hour or more. 

But after only minutes she lowers her head to dry her eyes at the knee of her jeans. “Sorry.  I keep crying at _random_ , the weirdest times of day, I wake up in the middle of the night crying.  No idea why.”  Well, now, I have something very obvious to say.  But at the slightest raising of my brow she rolls her eyes, “Not about dying.  You _are_ listening, aren’t you?  I’m not sad about dying.  I’m no use anymore anyway.  He made me, so he gets to decide if I-“

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Yes. He does.  It’s alright, detective.  It’s Him I’m worried about.  He doesn’t know what’ll happen to Him when I’m-“

This time it isn’t tears that choke her. She drops off more abruptly than that, tipping her head toward the window.  I try to ask what’s wrong and am sharply hushed.  In truth, now that I’m listening, there _is_ something to hear.  A car engine of a particular purring warmth and timbre, a gliding sort of a vehicle, but it is at some distance yet and if I weren’t paying attention it would be some time before I heard it.  She, however, caught it as prey might, and now that it is closer and she is certain, the Angel bounds to her feet and flees.  I am too slow to watch her vanish, but a door slams somewhere in the house.

At that same moment, a car door slams in the street, and sharp steps cross the pavement. 


	9. Chapter 9

Moriarty has sent less impressive envoys, and certainly less interesting ones. That vile little man in his glorified travel-agency, the used car dealer moving men to South America to fake their deaths – _faking death_!  There it is again, Christ, the man’s obsessed… What was I saying?  Oh yes.  That I’d take the mad little messenger over all but a few of them. 

What she’s done now is identify, at a distance where most people wouldn’t even hear it, the make and model of a car by the noise of its engine. From this she then progressed, through a number of assumptions, reasonable if flawed, to deduce the possibility of the identity of one particular possible passenger.  Then, though I believe she might well have realized all the mistakes she might be making – the vehicle might turn, might sweep on by and never stop, might not even be dreaming of the likes of poor us in the chintzy sitting room discussing her demise – she decided it wasn’t worth the risk.  Weighing the potential ramifications of being discovered, that was when she bolted and hid.  All in a matter of seconds, all while my ears were still picking out that one noise from the general traffic.

Perhaps I’m giving her too much credit. But the rap on the door comes at a familiar height and a familiar inorganic timbre; he knocks with the handle of the umbrella.  The word ‘familiar’ is appropriate, I always chose my words carefully.  Any word without at least two meanings in the context in which it is used is not doing nearly enough work.

Did I hear her take one set of stairs, or two? Either way I suppose it’s too late.  The best I can do for her is raise my voice enough to be heard upstairs; “It’s not locked.”

Mycroft pushes in off the street, one hand delicate brushing off the other sleeve as if it were sullied in the mere act of opening the door. “Really, Sherlock, you ought to be more careful-“  Oh, watch, watch this, this is always terrific; when he tries to express concern or some human emotion and has to do it with such disdain, has to do it with his eyes picking out the cracks in the ceiling plaster, just to cover up the fact that he cares, “-There’s all this dreadfully fashionable talk about _good_ areas of London, but I’m not sure any of them actually exist.  Made up, no doubt, to inflate prices…”

 _He_ really ought to let go of this awful grudge he has against estate agents.  It is no one’s fault he got shafted on the Richmond place but his own, and it’s becoming unseemly.  Half expect him to hiss like a cat every time he passes one of their offices…  But as I can’t have him hanging about, it might be best not to provoke him _immediately_.  Not directly, anyway.  Not anymore than strictly necessary.  Couldn’t stop _completely_ , daren’t be _nice_ to him.  He’d get suspicious. 

“Not like you to be down out of your roost,” he mutters, following me upstairs.

“Down paying the rent.”

“With no landlady?”

“A dead drop. In an empty box of washing machine tablets, underneath a full box at the back of the cupboard under the sink.  Mrs Hudson knows I love a bit of intrigue.”  I swear to you, I hear his eyes roll.  I don’t know if it’s squelch of the eye in the socket or some change in pressure as the weight of his disapproval is momentarily flung up into the vaulted ceiling of his skull, but there is some sense triggered, he does it so dramatically.  And then again, I wasn’t going to rile him, was I…  “I don’t like to watch _Judge Rinder_ on my own television.  Defiles the sanctity of the work space.”

In the doorway of the flat, the tips of his fingers rubbing experimentally at a smear on the mirror, “What sanctity?”

“Why are y-?” But I stop, and so does he despite not having been speaking, a moment of absolute disjunction with the world, as both of us notice something completely wrong, completely out of place; cigarette smoke. Fresh, still lit, _bloody_ close by, probably barely begun burning, bloody hell, where is it, reaching distance?  Patches, willpower… _Mycroft_.  “Not mine, before you even start.  Different brand.  A suspect’s brand actually, or he might be a victim.  Find out in about ten minutes when I’ve got a ground-out butt to study.”

“Oh, so you _do_ have something on.”

With that, he breezes past me, towards the windows but with his eyes on everything. Not like the girl was; she looked for her exits, her locks, defence and attack, best place to find a gun, a blade, what she’d been trained to see.  Mycroft is looking for _anything_.  Anything that will discredit me, that is, but that could mean _anything_.  He pauses at the coffee table, at a cigarette of, _graciously_ , an unfamiliar brand smouldering on a repurposed saucer, and I glance around, shocked to notice that there is nothing to notice.

Sorry, that’s a phrase I use frequently, understand implicitly, sometimes I get away from the fact that other people might not catch on.

What I mean is, the girl’s jacket, which had been hanging on the back of the desk chair while she played games on the laptop last night, is gone. Her shoes, which were where she stepped out of them in front of the fridge, are gone.  There isn’t a hair on the sofa.  There isn’t… There isn’t a hint of shampoo chemical scent, or artificial coconut, or the particular iron tang of her feet which still, from time to time, seep fine, yellowish plasma through pores to fine to let blood through.  The cigarette.  You smell nothing in this room except the cigarette.  Those other traces are still there, she couldn’t remove them, but she made sure there was something huge and glaring, all flashing lights and dancing girls, so there’s nothing else to notice.

 _I want one_.

A cigarette. That ugly thought, that low, laughing whisper at the back of my mind, it was about the cigarette, of course, the mechanics of addiction, fought forever, there is no such thing as craving-free, it doesn’t go away, the trick is to avoid triggers and here I am, triggered, that’s all.  That’s all I meant, a cigarette.  That was what I wanted one of.  That’s all.

Wanted it so much that Mycroft has spoken, stands expecting an answer, and I have to feign distraction to cover up the fact that I haven’t a clue what he said.

“I only enquired as to this _case_ of yours.”  The weight he puts on the word ‘case’ is crushing.  I have gotten used to it only in the way that a dog regularly kicked stops yelping, because he knows that’ll just get him kicked again.  “Generally they make themselves so apparent, splatter themselves across the walls but...” A helpless, open-handed gesture, that mild smile.

“It’s early days,” I say, and am about to launch into the familiar (that word again) assault which I know will ultimately drive him out unsatisfied, but Mycroft, it seems has more to say.

My apologies; I don’t know why I phrased that like I was surprised. Needless to say, I am not.

“Only I’d heard you’d taken rather a different approach with your latest client. Keeping things rather closer to the vest than usual?”

To assist with my act of utter incomprehension, to help me pause, I take this opportunity to really take a proper look at my brother. Not something I get to do very often.  In fact, something I normally avoid.  Actually, I’d rather look at the rotten remains of a one-eyed warthog, nine days in every ten, but while the opportunity is foisted upon me, well, oh, why not?  Needing something to notice I notice most determinedly that there is something oddly awkward about Mycroft in a suit.  Not in an obvious or unfortunate way; he _lives_ in a suit, so that would never, ever do.  In a less immediately obvious way, a sort of stiffness, as if that suit came with a different style of doll and is a little, unknowably, tight at the plastinated joints. 

…You know that’s made me feel better, as well as allowing me to convincingly pause.

“No, sorry,” I say, finally picking up his thread, “You’ve lost me.”

“A few days ago,” he elaborates, “You received a visitor. A young woman, reddish hair, some rather elaborate scarring.  Don’t shake your head; she was seen, as were you.”

“I only ever shake my head in disbelief, Mycroft. Can’t remember the last time your intelligence was wrong.”

“She wasn’t seen leaving, Sherlock.”

“Done her in, have I? Poured some fresh concrete in the basement?  No, better than that; chained up in the attic, isn’t that where mad things live?”  The trick of successful false laughter is not to breathe; expel all air from the lungs and then give a pop, promise it works.  That, or just imagine it’s real.  I, for one, can imagine all too easily how utterly hilarious it would be if my brother had really come here and this had really been his only gambit and he wasn’t correct.  He stands silent and takes it so bloody well, however, that it’s no fun at all after the first thirty seconds.  “Listen, present her to me and I’ll confess.”

Damn; he’s taking me up on the offer. Beginning with a supercilious tip of the head – how he can see into the kitchen down all the length of that nose of his, don’t ask me – he goes then to check the bathroom and, most pointedly, perhaps remembering similar situations not that long past, the bedroom.  He doesn’t mean me to notice, but he uses the glass in the frame of a picture that fell off the wall to check for her under the bloody bed.  All the while, I’m a half step behind.  “You’re not _actually_ looking?  Mycroft, this is ridiculous, what would I want with a client in the house?  Trust me, I am not yet so starved for company that I’ve forgotten how solitude suits me.  Mycroft!”

Upon this, and he is just turning onto the stairwell, not down to check the A-flat but up, up to that other room where I can only assume she is squirrelled away with her jacket and shoes and tiger and all her worldly belongings in a holdall, but upon my calling him he spins to me, “I don’t know what she told you. I don’t wish to know.  The _truth_ is, she works for Moriarty, has done for a long time, and can, therefore, have only one purpose in being here.  Turn her over to me.”

If he’s so determined, he can fight for her. Not even trying to sound convincing, “There’s no one here.”

He’s not leaving with her. Later he can send police, send round more of those dark cars she’s so scared of, sends those people who come and go silently and leave nothing but an empty space.  I wouldn’t put it past her to nip off out the back window.  Clever girl like that, long old terrace like this, if she goes, she goes.  Certainly I will not deliver her from one desired death into the hands of an uncertain one.  He will not leave with her this afternoon.

But upon his flinging open the door of the upstairs room, like the tormented gothic hero his heart has always longed to be (if you’d seen his house, you’d know what I mean), he falters, baffled. The bed is neatly made, and looks quite as though it has been for all the months it properly should have.  No bag, or at least nothing visible.  No hairbrush, no tiger, no trainers.  No trace.

I was only joking about the back window. I swear I was.

I have to follow him around the rest of the house wondering. He checks downstairs but I know she went up.  I can’t even concentrate when he demands to have the basement flat opened.  Standing in that damp, unfurnished box I finally managed to speak again, “Mycroft, one of us is imagining things, and I have yet to rush about muttering about phantom acolytes.”  He drifts out again, wordless, so while I am locking the door I ensure that he won’t linger, “If it’s any consolation at all, I almost wish she were real.  Sounds a lot more interesting than my little murder.  Which _is_ all I’m working on.  Mrs Hudson had a young niece in for tea the other day; maybe your man in black got confused, mh?”

Mycroft isn’t giving up, though. He has this horrible affliction which means that, when he does not find what he expected to, he assumes he must have missed something.  It allows him always to be right, even and especially when he is wrong.  He tells me again about the Angel and her God, tells me in broad strokes about the lunacy I have been able to observe in minute detail. _He_ tells _me_ that the creature is not as stupid as it pretends, as if we had lived these last days together, all three of us. 

“ _Enough_ ,” I say at the door.  “Whoever _does_ have her, you’re making me terribly jealous of him.”

With another grunt of disapproval – and disbelief – he leaves as abruptly as he appeared. He gets awfully frustrated, you know, when he doesn’t get his way.  And please, don’t think it’s all over just because he has deigned to piss off…  He knows ehs’ here.  Maybe he missed her, maybe she’d popped off down the shops or to the cinema or to church, however you wish to interpret that last one, but he knows she’s here. 

So do I, actually, just don’t have a clue where. I wait until he is long gone, until the car has purred away, long enough to make sure he hasn’t forgotten something on purpose just for the joy of coming back for it.  It is with this scenario in mind that I remember to lock the front door for once.  Then, at almost a run, back upstairs, “Hello?”  I ought to call her by her name.  She still hasn’t asked what it is.  I ought to call her by that and see how quickly she comes running.  Instead, the coward in me shouts, “Angel?”

A muffled reply of some kind. Not from downstairs, not from up above, but from the flat.  I follow the sound and shout for her again.  The reply is clearer this time, “Is that lanky fucker gone, please?”

From the bedroom, my room, the end of the hall.

No, but he checked there. He checked under the bloody bed, for God’s sake.  I myself lingered in the hallway – a show of unconcern, and I liked the echo of my laughter, making it the derision of five of me instead of just one – but there wasn’t anybody in the room.  Did she open the window, hang from the sill by her fingertips?  No, how would she have gotten back in?

But even as I approach, the door of the wardrobe is punched open, and she rolls, on a wave, a formless mass of clothes, books, apparatus, forgotten, broken things, clutching her white track shoes to her chest, moaning something about a smell. Obviously she chose her hiding place before she had looked inside.  No one who knew me at all would ever have dreamt there was room for her.  But by that point, I suppose, Mycroft was through the door downstairs and she’d left herself no choice.  She made the most of it.

At first I believe the reason she stays balled up on the floor, the reason she hasn’t untangled her feet from a ragged old jumper of mine, is because she has been balled up stiff so long. But it goes on too long for that, and she’s shaking.  Still clinging to her shoes, her eyes are on something with weight, something which skidded out of the mess to the end of the bed. 

“I don’t like your brother,” she is telling it. I pace, slower than I could say why, to where I will be able to see what so holds her focus.  “He had me picked up for a few days, while everybody was being dead.  I suppose he thought I knew something.  I suppose I probably did, but I didn’t.  He sounded like he was worried about you.  And that’s a brother thing, so he probably is, and I’m probably a terrible bitch but…  But some part of him was probably just worried what I might tell you.  I’m not going to, though…”

In the same second I see what holds her attention, mindlessly chase ideas, ways to get between her and it, and in that same second she looks away and up at me. “I’m sorry,” she mumbles.  “But I just didn’t think you’d be allowed to have one anymore, after what you did.”

“I’m not,” I tell her, sweeping down to snatch the gun off the floor, throwing it back into the depths of the wardrobe while she finally sits up, rolling the crackle out of her neck. “Nor was I ever.  Nor do I.”

“The Colonel taught me to shoot. And Miss Mies gave me a gun not very long ago.  It wasn’t really a gift, it was… It was sort of a promise she wanted me to make, and I couldn’t make it.  I promise I was just looking, I wasn’t going to touch it or anything.”

She sits on the floor, passing me item after item as she undoes her charity shop cocoon to be shoved back to its proper place in the known disorder.   “You don’t like your brother either, do you?”  She catches the slightest shift in my demeanour, “Nothing to do with the gun, totally different conversation, only commented on the gun because I didn’t know I was sitting on it, promise, cross my heart and… and you don’t like that phrase.  This is different.”

“We don’t share a perspective on the world.”

“But you _used_ to like him, once, way back.  I hear it in your voices.  My Uncle Charlie and Miss Mies, they hate each other, but they used to be close too, and it’s a totally different thing to listen to than people that just hate each other.”  Ignore it.  Ignore that entirely.  Don’t let that in.  It’s incorrect anyway, but it’s the sort of thing which, allowed to fester, might start gathering little bits of false evidence, like gravel in a snowball, making something harmless into a lethal, brutal missile.  Don’t let that in.  Forget she said that.  Fools may speak the truth where no one else can but they can also on occasion be no more than fools.  Wisdom is knowing when to listen and I will not listen to that, thank you, and eventually, in the face of my utter indifference, she moves on.  “Is your brother’s aide still a woman who tells people her name is Anthea?”

“As far as I know.”

“Would you like to know her real name? Back when they had me, I was there for days, he called her by it once in front of me.  It was an accident and I pretended I hadn’t noticed, I was doing a Sudoku and I think they thought I was so stupid I was probably finding it really difficult, so it was easy.  But I could tell you her real name, and the next time you see her, you could call her by it, and they’d both be really shocked and angry.”

I hold out one hand to help her up from the floor. Just for that, just for that offer alone, “Tell me over dinner.  We’ll order something in.  Tell me, how do you feel about Cluedo?”

“I’m quite good at it, actually.”

“Finally, get some proper action going. But tell me too, when you say Mycroft had you _picked up_ …”

Her head dips. She charms herself back to smiling with a little flick of her foot, kicking something of faded cloth up from the floor to her hand.  By the time she passes it to me, she has recovered enough to go on.  “I didn’t like it very much.  Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t anything painful.  I was taken care of.  They just kept me for a couple of days, tried to get me to talk, except I didn’t know anything.  Really, I was very grateful they were so kind about it.  I know how awful they can be.  I saw what they did to the boss, and to Miss Mies.  Did you know about that?  You were in Shropshire or something chasing a giant purple dog; maybe that was Lord Vader’s way of making sure you didn’t find out…”

To keep myself from saying anything about Mycroft or Mies or being put out of the way, “It wasn’t purple.”

“Wasn’t it? Maybe I heard that wrong…  Was it a werewolf?”

“Those aren’t real.”

“How do you know? Had you ever met an angel, before I come?”


	10. Chapter 10

“Lend me a cat.”

I have left that celestial other in the capable hands of my landlady and come down to Camden. Across from me in button-backed armchair is a woman with a twisted knee and a walking stick, and a memory of more physically complete times so perfect, so inherent, that I swear that I _see_ her cross and re-cross her legs.  It is not possible, the brace worn from thigh to mid-calf prevents it.  Still, she wants too so badly and I know it so well, I see it.  “There is a crude joke to be made there,” she says.  “I can’t quite get at it but it’s got the word ‘pussy’ in it.”

“Danielle, please,” but it just makes her laugh at her own joke, since I won’t. As if to illustrate my point a cat pads up to her feet and climbs the leg brace to sit in her lap.  It is the match of the one already exploring the bookshelves behind her, which are, for the record, emptier than I ever remember them being but this is hardly the time.  “Look!  You’ve got two, and I have none, it’s hardly fair.”

Stop that. That look on your face, stop it at once.  I know I don’t sound like myself.  It is lighter at heart, pettier, younger, unobjective.  But she knew me then, and she likes to think she can bring it out of me.  In the past it has made her pliable.  Of course it has chosen _now_ to stop bloody working.

“You can’t just show up and demand one of my pets as a hostage-“

“A _loan_.”

“Regardless, I’m afraid it won’t work. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to.  I’m sure she could use the warmth and affection, given her circumstances, but-“

“She could. I will bypass your little jab at my social skills and admit, she absolutely could –“  And the Lady Mies still sits with her lips parted, her unfinished sentence hanging behind him, but when she sees me go to continue she closes them in resignation, “ – So upset about the bloody cat, you wouldn’t believe.  Enjoying a nice game of Scrabble late last night and she decides to go off on one about the cat, nearly brought herself to tears…”

My host furrows her fine, expensive brow, “Scrabble?”

“She won. Did you know ‘bingewatch’ is in the dictionary now?”

Danielle sighs. She thinks again – I _swear_ , I hear her – about the old, beloved apparatus of her legs, all the elegant bits of business she could be plying against me, or attempting to anyway, and she mourns it.  After a moment, however, she goes to a secondary favourite; she can still produce and light a cigarette without the slightest show of weakness, and with all the calm and precision of her former profession.

This woman was a thief, you know. In a way, it’s how we met.  Long story, that, but not a bad one.  For all I know she still is.  I don’t put it past her.

“Do you have to?” I say, immediately cringing from my own mistake. Even acknowledging this cheap, overused move, it’s beneath us both.  If the traces of the one the girl burned in the apartment weren’t still so fresh, I’d never have fallen for it.

In answer, the lady (I use the term advisedly, she has come into her title only lately) pushes up from her chair with the aid of the glossy Macassar cane and waves ribbons of choking, Victorian tobacco smog into the farthest reaches of the world. “Jim shut me down.  Did she tell you about this?”  A little, but Danielle will tell me more if I do not interrupt.  “Almost entirely.  Left me my _natural_ name, the _family_ home,” and a broken, ugly noise of distaste from the back of her throat emphasizes what she clearly thinks of these things.  “I blew up the latter and used the insurance to buy this place back. _Buy back_.  Can you imagine?  I’ve lived here since I was twenty-two, had to move out and in again.  And in the meantime, pre-auction, it had been _cleaned_ , would you believe!  I overheard some other prospective buyers mention how it stank and I got so hopeful.  And then I came back and…  Well, it hardly even feels like home anymore.  So yes.  Yes, I have to.  Anyway, to get back to what I was saying – _Put him down!_ ”

The cat, she means. Dislodged from her lap he had wandered over to investigate my presence.  It’s only natural.  I had absolutely no intention of stealing him, hadn’t so much as entertained the idea.

“It won’t _work_ ,” she sighs, coming to take him from me.  Even with one hand on the cane, she manages it, and he knows his way up her arm to drape her shoulder like a stole.  “She has met both of my cats.  She’ll know them in an instant.”  Ruefully, “For one so blind, she’s painfully observant.”

“I’m counting on it.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Warmth and affection are to be no more than a happy side effect. I need her to go running home.”

In a former life she would have whipped around on me, all flying hair and burning eyes, the image of hell-hath-no. In this, she stiffens her turned back and addresses some distant speck on the air as if she cannot bear to look at me.  Good to see her adapting to altered circumstances.  “You would have me appear a traitor, would get me _killed_ because-“ 

“Yes.”

Because she can handle herself. Because the girl will not fight to prevent dying, and Danielle will.  I trust her to fight, perhaps even to survive.  The girl won’t. 

Slowly, painfully, Mies sits down again. Next to me, this time.  Where I sit on the edge of the couch she lies back against it, on her better side, looking into me, and through me.  “You can’t help her,” she says in hard, comfortless little pebbles of noise, pelting me with sense when I do not want it.  Why did I come here?  When I know she always talks this way, in truth or lies, when I have come in the past specifically to hear her talk this way, why did this feel like a good idea in the early hours of this morning?  I ought to take up sleeping, you know.  I’d bet the girl has never gotten herself in a spot like this because she thought of something at four a.m.  Before I have quite recovered from one volley, Mies launches another, “She isn’t willing to be hel-“

“She is _not_ willing to die!”

“She is less willing to disobey!” comes the counter to my interruption. I was too sudden, too loud.  In only matching me, however, she shatters the world and all the pretence.  Don’t’ you just bloody hate people who tell you things you already know?  Things you’ve been wilfully avoiding, things you put to the back of your mind, those damned, wicked people who just have to reach in with manicured claws and hook them out in the open, wet, ugly things like organs torn from the living flesh of you, just as painful, as raw.  A perfectly understandable reaction to my rage and the fact that it would be really very gauche of me to strangle a lady and my host and one less able than myself, I fall back against the sofa cushions, holding back my head as though the ceiling might have the answers written on it.

She holds out her cigarette, and it doesn’t pain me to admit, I am reaching for it before I remember to flatten out my hand in a refusal. If she waved it at me again, I’d take it, but she doesn’t. 

“What am I supposed to do?”

“It’s better for her,” she mutters. “Look at us.  We were never meant to make it this far.  How many times over should you be dead?  Think about it for a moment.  I run out of fingers and toes, when I try to count.  And look at us.  Not just you and I but I’ll name you a dozen more like us.  Cripples and freaks and heartless shrivelled bastards.  And it’s worse for the Angel because she thinks she wants it.  Let her get out now.”

Forty-seven. I’m sorry, I know she had moved on, she made some other point which I am vaguely aware of disagreeing with, but I’m back at where she asked me to count.  All told, including the various narcotic events I usually discount, it’s forty-seven.  In all my life, forty-seven.  Forty-eight if you count falling off a bridge into a lake as a child but my parents have always assured me I only _thought_ I would die, and was never in any real danger.  …Make it forty-eight; parents lie.  Anyway, what was she saying, what didn’t I like?

Ah, yes; the part where the frankly insane workings of fate which have kept the spent and uncaring alive are supposed to apply to the girl also. No.  That’s the part I didn’t like.

“He’s going to burn her alive, Danielle.” She seizes.  “Sorry, didn’t I mention that before?”

“And you’re still using her to get to J-“

“No, to stop him, if I find him he can’t k-“

“You’re using her.” Her full stop stops us both.  To clean up a phrase which was rather more colourful when I heard it from Mary, _you can’t kid a kidder_.

And because I am no longer denying it an anger in her hardens, crystallizes. With motions too sharp, making the animal mewl, she begins to loosen the collar on the nearest cat.  “For the record,” she says as she goes, “You can James can both hang, for all I care.  Or hang each other, if it pleases you.  And henceforth –“ The collar comes away and I am presented with a rather well-fed pretence to a stray, “ – Expect that I shall do no more than measure out rope.”


	11. Chapter 11

A career on the stage would have suited the girl or myself equally. In some other life, some other universe, that is what we are.  In some other life it’s Christmas, and I Scrooge, and she the first of the improbable dreams that comes disguised as a young girl’s ghost or a waifish angel.  And the stage it must be; we lack the subtlety demanded of the cinematic set.  We haven’t their crass self-control.  Our shared acting style is concerned only with communicating emotion in an easily readable way. 

…That I can’t even tell if I am being glib or sentimental, that I only know either is equally inappropriate, that’s not good, is it?

This thespian train of thought has been running since the ugly, charmless moment in which I presented the girl with the pilfered cat. I pretended I wasn’t doing anything wrong or underhanded, and she pretended, firstly not to recognize the animal and secondly, that she was thrilled.  This last, actually, that might have been real, I suppose.  Her joy has always been genuine before, and her interest certainly rings true.  Fast friends now, girl and cat; there’s been a frankly shocking amount of mewling and jumping about going on in that upstairs room, and that’s just from the human half of the pair.  But listening from the landing I have heard the murmuring too. _Poor thing_ , she said. _Well_ , she said, _it’s a holiday for you, isn’t it? It’s an adventure, taking off with that strange man to meet your old angel-mate._ With the other cat I saw in mind, _Think of the tale you’ll have to tell your sister!_

In short, she was onto me from the word-go. Which is fine.  That was the plan.  If she _hadn’t_ recognized the spoiled, tawny purebred, hadn’t at least clocked that it could never have been, as she was, pulled from a skip, this all fell apart.

Still, I’d like it known, it was the prop and not the acting. The greatest Hamlet ever to tread the boards, with the best will in the world, could only ever do so much with a plastic Halloween Yorick.

The animal’s name is Kurgan, by the way. Both it and the girl know it. 

Around one in the morning, when I have already been sitting for some time noiseless with all the lights out, the girl comes down from upstairs with him balled up inside the wing of her jacket, and when he mewls at the disturbance, “Hush, Kurgan, please. We have to go, alright?”  And, bizarre as it may seem, Moriarty’s young Eliza appears to have something in common with the more famous Doolittle – Kurgan shuts up.  Long enough, at least, for her to pause on the other side of the door, mere inches from me and a world away.  We both of us are holding our breath.  The slightest change in her presence, however, tells me she can sense something of me, and I feel her weight out there begin to lower.  At first it seems she means to look through the keyhole, but she drops farther than that, and it is only just in time that I see what she’s doing, and move away from the door.  The Angel peers beneath it, for the streetlight glow through the front windows, for the possibility of light from the laptop, and for the blackness of my feet blocking it out to shadow. 

Clever creature. Not clever, or perhaps brave, enough to come in and be sure, though.  This is enough for her, and she clambers back to her feet and darts off.  Softened steps; I don’t follow right away.  I let her stop down in the hall and pull on her shoes.  I let her go out, let the door close behind her, and then I count to ten.  Then I follow. 

The pursuit is rather basic. Not expecting me, she is in no particular hurry and, though I’m told, apparently, it doesn’t do to be too proud of one’s own prowess, I’d wager I have a little more experience in this department than she does.  Perhaps it is worth noting that the uneasy quiet, the casual menace, of the night seems content to swallow her.  It accepts her in a way that I have never really been able to manage, enfolds and protects her like a mother recognizing a child.  Arguably she is owed protection by that which is responsible for making her.  Her God and I could have words along that same vein.  For now, suffice to note that she goes unnoticed.  The attention of all those who pass her slides off.  People are so unwilling to see the mad, you know.  Maybe because the next step after seeing it is dealing with it.

It is very rare that I have any time to formulate social commentary, but you see she’s leading me quite a way. With the cat in her arms, no cab will stop, busses are out, she could try and sneak him onto the Tube, but it’s not worth the aggravation and potential repercussions of getting caught.  The walking is not what bothers me, but the familiarity of it.  The farther she leads me, I begin to recognize the route, and I know with dread where we are going long before we ever arrive there.

Camden Town. Mies’ flat. 

The girl is not running home to her God or her handler or her dearest friend in all the world. She is showing me nothing I didn’t already have, returning stolen property to its owner.  I watch her from the corner, crouching again to drop the cat from that careful cuddle to her chest.  It slips to the ground, jumping as though startled, and sits looking up at her for a baffled moment.  It has almost certainly been warm and comfortable, and now finds itself cold on the pavement right back where it began having failed in its task, not even been outwitted but simply failed, not enough to drive her on, the result of a slight misjudgement of her character and I should _not_ be blaming the brute animal, should I?  You know, I don’t believe I’m even talking about the brute animal. 

She brought it home. No desire to get Mies in any trouble?  Not wanting to bear such terrible turncoat news back to her unpredictable boss?  What?  What is the reason?  What did I get wrong?

“Go on,” she mutters. The street is quiet enough to hear, “Go back to your sister and your mum.”  Following the little flicks her hand, the cat looks over his hackle and sees a window he recognizes, a Juliet balcony with dead basil and live catnip spilling through it.  He pads back and forth on the pavement, trying to decide the best route up, getting nowhere.  “Fucking indoor cats,” she hisses and rushes up to the door, pressing down and down on the buzzer.

As soon as a light goes on behind that railing above, the girl stops pressing and runs. Not back towards me, continuing the way she came.  In my surprise, she gets a bit of a head start.  By the time I catch up, the end of the street, the only corner she could have turned, a choice from left to right, I’ve lost sight of her entirely, could be on the wrong street, am resigning myself to having lost her and wondering what she’ll say in the morning, if we’ll just pretend this never happened, am passing behind the Perspex of a bus shelter and _jump_ when a fist flashes up on the other side and raps hard.

She doesn’t even turn her head. Just knocks to make me see her.  A step or two back, I round the shelter and sit on the other end of the bench.

“I thought we had an understanding, detective? I thought we were friends now.  Why would you _do_ something like this?”  A palpable disappointment, a nearness to tears again, as strong as I’ve only seen it when she talks about leaving her God behind all alone in the world, when she talked last night about how she’s the only one that takes care of the cat anymore, how she worries about both of them.  “You meant me to go back, didn’t you?  But I _can’t_ go back, you must know that, it’s obvious, that _has_ to be rule number one – _Never come home again, Angel, say goodbye to Mac, Angel. Angel, it’s only a week, you can live without me that long.  I’ll see you at the finale, a chuisle_ …  What time is it?”

She only asks to pull herself away from hysteria. Her voice was starting to catch.  To help, I tell her, “Just after two.”

“We’ve missed the night bus across the park. Do you want to walk behind the zoo and listen to the animal noises?  They don’t sleep, did you know that?  Things in cages never do.  It’s funny; you’re never safer than when you’re in a cage, but you never feel like you’re in more danger, because you can’t hide.  They stay up all night and growl.”

I stand again and wait for her. It takes her a moment to move, and when she does she is all weight, all exhaustion.  Her feet won’t quite lift, but scrape the pavement by my side.  She mumbles once or twice, how her boss knows not to trust Miss Mies anyway, how her agreeing to help me wouldn’t surprise him, so on and so forth.  But her enthusiasm is fading.  In the course of one sentence she slips back to calling him ‘Mr Moriarty’, and it is the first time I’ve heard her say it without reverence. 

We are barely across the street when she stumbles, reels a step and collides with a wall. There she stays, hanging against it, until I double back to help her up.  “Sorry,” she says.  “Knackered.  I think I’m, like, _pre_ -dying?  Like, just, like, _quietly_ falling apart?  So when it comes to it, there won’t be any Angel left, and I think that’ll be easier on him, somehow?”

“Stop.”

“No, please. I’ve been talking to the cat all day, and he’s a great listener but I don’t think he really understood.  And you will.  Because I think you’ve made people feel this way before.  I don’t want you to take that as an insult or anything –“ As long as she’s talking, she’s awake.  As much as I’d rather have her tell me the alphabet, rather play some kind of game to keep her mind active, she has begun to tell me something, and seems intent on finishing.  “ – But you’re a good person, and an interesting person, and people want you to like them.  So you’ve probably made people feel before as if… Like, I just want to know what I’ve done?  He _swears_ , swears blind, I’ve done nothing, I’ve only ever been good, and that this is just the last good thing I have to do for him?  And ninety-nine percent of me knows that, and is completely sure.  Like, I know this isn’t punishment?  And I’m still right and good?” 

Another stumble, a breath that might be ‘stop, I need to stop’. With the back of my hand I check her for fever and find nothing.  There is nothing in her eyes but a lost drifting; nothing narcotic.  As ridiculous as the notion may be, I can’t shake her own assertion; pre-dying.  Quietly falling apart.  Biologically, ridiculous.  She is expecting a sudden and painful murder, not fading away under some long illness.  Psychologically there might be some logic to her crumbling but why so suddenly, why now?

But while I am close, her eyes flare wide and she begs again, “I just want to know what I’ve done.”

So simple, it hardly seems like an answer. She wants to know what she’s done.  The angel that God no longer wants, what has she got?  Why should she continue to exist? 

And tonight, he was betrayed. Albeit by someone he apparently no longer trusts, wouldn’t be surprised she betrayed him, so on and so forth.  But tonight the Angel knew something which affected him directly, and she could do nothing about it.  She’s disappearing.  From the inside out, purpose first, stranding her self and identity.  The centre can’t hold, and everything drifts, beginning to give up. 

“If he was here…” The eyes shut again, fluttering a little in the rapture of the mere thought, “If he was _here_ , he’d tell me I’m still perfect…  And I’d believe him, because he’d be here and telling me…  But on my own I get weak, see?  Weak and selfish, so totally not-angel, he’d be so disappointed, but it really does start to feel like punishment…”   

“It is!” I shake her shoulders, hard, snapping him painfully back to the real world, glowering at me out of the reverie, “But not you, me.  Heaven knows what for.  Daring to be alive, maybe, having the sheer gall to outsmart him but-“

But she has been shaking her head and now, “Not you!” Her strength is sudden and surging.  It burns, demands I let go of her, take a step back so she can storm forward, keep the gap between us closed.  Her face is tipped up and her hand lifts to press my chest, as if she’d like to shove me out in front of the next cab, then get in and ask it to drive over me.  “Never you, never _ever_ bloody _you_!  Christ, I would have _explained_ this, except he never told me I’d have to.  You should totally get this!  Oh, detective!  None of this is designed to hurt _you_!” 

I insulted _Him_ , didn’t I?  Got him wrong, misinterpreted him.  I blasphemed in front of the true believer.  Dying embers blasted to beating furnace heat because she has to defend him.  The righteous warrior, though you can still read every muscle and bone as spent and loose, is awakened, held together by pure fury.

“This is a mark of _respect_ to you,” she cries.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got something to say to that, but this really doesn’t seem to be the time.  “ _You_ are why I have to be destroyed; so he can take you on proper, see?  See, he relies on me.  More than he ever admitted to me until right before he made me leave him; I keep him normal.  I make sure he eats and the flat is taken care of and the cat gets its shots.  And just the fact that I’m always there and he has this one constant thing, he relies on that.  I keep him normal.  Ish.  And he knows normal’s not enough anymore.” 

Stop. Stop, Angel, we’ll go and listen to the animals growling behind concrete walls.  We’ll go home and play Cluedo again.  You’re not yourself.  Come back and make cheesecake, late-night biscuits.  We’ll sit up late.  I’ll deduce talk show guests until you fall asleep.  Stop.

“Do you see?” she begs. _See_ , always _see_ or _look_.  She never asks anyone to listen or to come to her or to take something in hand, it’s always _see, look, watch_ \- proof.  She asks for nothing that is not seen and known and physical.  Proven.  She herself is proof.  Proof of angels, which are themselves proof of their creator.  “He’s doing this for _you_.”  The word of God, gospel, which only angels and visions can relay to mere mortals.  “He is giving me up to make himself impressive for _you_.”

“Stop.”

Faltering, another stagger, a reeling step that rolls her off the wall but the moment I step towards her she stamps at me, forces me back. She isn’t shoving me anymore, but holding out her hands in offering.  My incomprehension is crushing to her.  If she could only make me _see_ …  With her broken heart pressing forward through her features, here comes the wisdom of the ages, here comes the most she can possibly tell me.  Here she is doing her utmost to help me.

“Some part of Him, when He lets it, when He dares to dream, is hoping you will do the same. He knows you won’t, but he still hopes.  What with Doctor Watson being married off now, and all…  The choice of bride worried him a bit, but I think the sprog has set his mind at rest…”  


	12. Chapter 12

The rest of the days pass without event.

Yes, I’m surprised too. I don’t even try anything.  Believe me, I think of a great many things I might try.  Mary phoned, I think out of curiosity more than anything.  Certainly she wasn’t worried about anybody, seemed to find the whole situation delightfully amusing, utterly unaffected by the idea of the upcoming death until I pointed it out to her. _Have her sectioned_ , that was Mary’s suggestion.  Not a bad one either; an easily provable lunatic, patently a danger to herself if not to others, and it wouldn’t take much of a lie to put ‘others’ in the frame.  She has told me in all these days with delight about Her First Bomb, when she delivered the parts to the maker, Her First Drug Murder, where she took the fatal dose right to the scene of the crime, so on and so forth.  Frankly, she oughtn’t be allowed to roam the streets.  And, telling nobody anything I know about her, and the girl herself still avoiding the knowledge of her name, a secure hospital wing couldn’t be very far away.  Though locked doors and three-foot walls probably aren’t very much of a deterrent to a desperate angel, It doesn’t need to contain her very long.

This is the ninth night. In twenty-four hours she expects to be well on her way to her pyre.

This, in fact, is one thing I have had done. I have sent out the call, and have been receiving pictures all day, of potential bonfires being built around the city.  It’s the wrong time of year, and there aren’t too many.  But, though I have turned up one flower-wreathed urban druid altar and several pallet-stacked skips that might have been of interest, none of them has felt right yet.  In truth, I’m not sure it was a good idea to begin with, might just be something that lingers with me, just an idea that I myself have had too close a personal experience with, colouring my perception of the concept of anyone being tragically burned alive. 

Besides, she never mentioned a pyre. She mentioned lighter fluid and clothing so cheap and important it is not entirely flame-retardant. 

 _Give her to me_ , wasn’t that my brother’s assertion?  I am ashamed to admit it, but in these last days I have considered that too.  More than once, in fact.  But he never told me why he wants her, and she did tell me why he wanted her last time.  He wanted information.  He considers her an excellent source, and certainly that was the first thing that crossed my mind when she introduced herself.  Not only could she at any moment and by any word or signal give up Moriarty’s current location, but oh, the stories she tells.  The Colonel’s married now, and got a little stepson.  Uncle Charlie is just wrapping up his interim business in Florida and is expected ‘home’ within the month.  Though I caught her poisonous Aunty Penny only weeks ago, the conviction is not expected to stick, and she should be back in the fold before Christmas.  Being locked in doesn’t bother her, so he’d have to keep her a while.  But she does like to talk, seems to relish the opportunity, the interaction, you wonder what _He_ is like to live with when she’ll gabble at anybody who listens and not always be watching her every word, she’d tell it all eventually.

Mies said she could move her out of the country, Lestrade would arrest her at the first breath of her litany of crimes, and there is some part of me that is silently _begging_ Mrs Hudson to offer her the basement flat and some sort of post helping around the house.  That hip of hers, don’t you know, she could use the back up. 

Currently the flat is cleaner than it has been in months. And the girl has excellent organizational skills.  Somehow she’s managed to get all the chemistry equipment from the kitchen table to fit against the wall under the upper kitchen cupboards, arranged not by size or shape or anything so arbitrary, but so as for basic experiments to be easily grabbed at once together; stand by pipette, burner under trivet under gauze, hasn’t that infuriating habit of stacking beakers inside each other from large to small so that the one you need is always in the bloody middle, but has stood them out individually with slices of plastic she’s stolen from somewhere making three shelves.  She sorted the papers on the desk and I can still find everything.

She has also cooked every meal, baked everything there is to be baked, lined up the bookshelves spectrographically by genre and use so that one fades into the other and everything has a comprehensible place and spent one charming afternoon filling the narrow hallway with piles of papers, clearing out the cupboard that tends to get the old casework shoved into it. Piles to be kept, piles for recycling, she got everything down to a couple of boxes ultimately.

Finding the newspaper clippings from the pool and what went before (she calls it _The Greenwich Job_ ), she pored over them as if she’d just found all her childhood memories.  Some of those, though she thinks I didn’t see her, she stuffed in her pockets and has kept them, has folded them up and stuffed them between the cupboards of the notebook she brought here empty. 

Reading about the trial she giggled, “I was the first one he told about any of that, you know, only I was too stupid to get it. He bought me skates, see?”  She waited, and I had nothing to offer, “Nah, you don’t get it either.  It’s this stupid old song.  I knew it but I never figured out until later.  I got a brand new pair of rollerskates because he had a brand new key.”

Not a stupid old song I was familiar with, then, but I have gotten to know it since, because it got in her head. See?  Look, she’s been humming ever since, sharp, unsettling swings into falsetto, chirpy as birdsong, and has been tripping around the house on the balls of her feet, dancing, and every time she loses the lyrics and drifts away it is because that same soft, babbling giggle has carried her off to some other thought.

Never mind her, _I’ll_ be mad by the time she’s gone.

Hysteria. An idiot would see it.  She is spiralling so close to the end now that this is all she can do.  These are the tasks that have always been expected of her.  She has no affairs of her own to set in order, so she is tidying up mine.  Sometimes I catch her quiet and eyeing me, as if she is trying to see into my head, and get the horrible, inexplicable notion that she is wondering why I haven’t done anything yet.  Worse, that she thinks something is already done, and that she has missed it.

And here, the ninth night, the last chance, she is at her very worst.

She laughs only at the thoughts in her own head. These come constantly.  So hyperactive she vibrates, blurs at the edges, this is the first time she’s made a mess while cooking, a constant stream of little _oops_ and _buggers_ and promises to thoroughly clear up afterward.  I have no idea what she’s making.  Meat-deep and vinegar sharp it has a vaguely Mediterranean feel but I suspect she doesn’t know what it is either.  She’s using up all the things she brought here.  She is deleting herself.

When my brother came, it was done in moments. She called it luck; her bag was down in the utility room, she went to do washing before she even realized John was here.  She had brought the stuffed tiger, she says, for company.  She called it luck and seemed very scared at the idea of anything of hers having been found.  Ever since then, her belongings have been tightly packed behind the door of the upstairs room. 

I told you before, she has already stopped existing. That night by the park she did it too perfectly.

“Stop,” I say. I don’t look to see what she might be in the middle of.  She’s busy, I know that much and enough.

On day one, the answer would have come, _Nah, I’m just finishing this_ or _Hang about_.  Today there is a little clatter of switches flicked and knobs turned down and she comes immediately to the edge of the living room.  “Sit down,” and she does it without a word, and with her eyes on me. 

This is the state He found her in, you know. So without agency, so devoid of personality, she only obeyed.  I realize now, any personality she ever had came from Him.  A gift, like she insists her wings are.  And like any gift it can be claimed back at will.  But after a moment, left sitting without any input from me, she begins to itch, to glance over her shoulder, to listen more intently to leftover sizzling.  No peace; you can practically hear her rattling.

Do you know how they met? Shall I tell you?  She told me, late one night, lying on my floor reading maps of London like they were Dickens.  She put her finger down on a page, “I was sitting just there, in a doorway next to an Oxfam shop.  Best spot I ever had.  You want to be next to a charity shop, let me tell you.  Guilt, see?  Guilt is good as cash in hand, mate.  But just across _here_ ,” drawing with her finger, “is a posh coffee shop.  And I don’t know what he was there for, if he was meeting somebody, if it was a drop off of some kind, but your brother’s car was outside it.  Driver still sitting in it and everything.  I didn’t know it was his at the time, didn’t know for months, actually, but-“

But Moriarty did. He saw it, saw the girl, went back the way he’d come and returned minutes later with one hundred pounds and a dozen fresh eggs.  He handed these things to the girl and pointed at the car. 

That was that. Deal done. 

She opens her mouth to speak, and I, for the third time in as many days, stand up and go to the desk. “Ah, no, please,” she groans.  “Come on, we talked about this.  Just put it in my bag for me.  I don’t need it, it’s for Him anyway.  It doesn’t do me any good to know.  Please, don’t put that in front of me again,” and the ramble ends with a cry of disgust, eyes shut, head flung away as I hold a manila folder skinny as she is open in front of her. 

There was very little to find on her. God changes the name of his Angel every week or so, just to keep her safe and unknown, and so she never gets used to one I.D. more than any other.  Perhaps in a few weeks I will receive a compilation of criminal records with some cross-referential match but it will be too late by then.  DNA got me only the starter kit.  That, after all, was what she asked for; _the girl me and Him took apart and used to make me_. 

“Your name –“ I begin, finally, to hell with what she wants, to hell with breaking her, to hell with taking the angel out of her, whatever is left can be built again.

But squealing she drowns me out, hands to her ears, “ _I’ve got a brand new pair of roller skates, you’ve got a brand new key_ …”

The words judder with what I think, at first, is her sobbing. It turns into or turns out to be another one of her long, delirious laughs.  Her eyes flash open when I take her by the chin, grabbing her face back to centre.  I look right into them.  They sparkle, yes, they gleam.  But the pupils are no bigger or smaller than they ought to be.  A pity; it would have explained so much.  Would have been sensible too, for her to have been sent along here with some supply, to keep herself happy and pliant until tomorrow. 

“You can’t stop it,” she says. I flinch; hadn’t expected her to speak again, or at least not to be coherent when she did.  

Didn’t expect her to have hardened, and to say something which goes so completely against all her desperate dancing and the pleading eyes of the last few days.

“My death, I mean. That was never on the table.  I told you that, day one, didn’t I?  And if you suddenly decide to stop playing the game, detective, and just keep me, I’ll take care of it myself.  Here, in your apartment, and in such a way you will never forget it, your beloved landlady will have a heart attack and join me on the other side and even your vile brother won’t be able to mop it up before the cops and papers get here, alright?”

She has never been so hard, so vicious. Has declared herself monster but never been one until now.  I let go of her face, back a step away.

“Don’t look at me like that!” she cries. “I never wanted to threaten you.  He told me I would need to but I thought I knew better and we could be friends.  But we can’t, can we?”  She grabs the file from my hand, grabbing it shut in the process.  Me, in my shock, I let it go when I know I shouldn’t.  She folds it roughly in half and makes for the door.  “Now I’ll be back in a minute and everything will be nice again.  We’ll have dinner.  It’ll be nice, wait and see.”

“Your family history is a catastrophe,” I call in her wake. More to see her freeze than anything else, to see the suddenly quickened breath rack her body, to see her suddenly fight to cope and to keep me out.

I tell her, in soft, measured phrases I’ve been composing for days, that I have been unable to discover who her father was, because no one ever knew. She was born in a rehabilitation centre and it is between that facility and a low-security women’s prison that her mother has spent most of the last twenty years.  She has two half-brothers, also incarcerated, a half-sister who died as an infant in circumstances which were considered suspicious at the time and three other siblings which never got a chance to develop a definite gender, if she wants to count those.  The care system was not kind.  She was fifteen when she decided her chances were better alone in the world.

All of this takes less than two minutes. It is an infinitely long time to stare at her heaving back. 

At the end of it, however, she turns, this time with tears in her eyes. She runs back across the room and throws her arms around me, lingers that way until I have to forcibly prise her way, when she stands still close with her hands at my elbows, holding us linked.  “ _Thank you_ , detective,” she breathes, glittering. 

Before I can say anything in acceptance of her gratitude, “Oh my God… He really did save me, didn’t he?”

And her determination, which I had thought might be wavering, might have been disappearing along with her sense of self and the sense in her storytelling, is suddenly crystallized again, into the perfect devotion of a woman much older than she is or a child too young to know better.

Needless to say, this is not what I meant to happen.

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

“… _When hearts are high, the time will fly so whistle while you work_ ,” and she does, both whistle and work, the last morning of her life, going with a children’s-film-happy heart about removing herself from the world. 

I woke to her singing this morning. Trying to be noticed one last time, maybe, or perhaps just not trying to be invisible anymore, thinking nothing can happen to her anymore.  Since then she has used my shredder to destroy the notebook she brought – don’t worry; I went through it last night and found nothing but doodles, dim, inconsequential little thoughts about me, more song lyrics – has picked all the hairs out of her brush and flushed them away, has combed every inch of the flat picking herself out of the very fibres.  I found her sitting on the floor between the windows, still in her pyjamas, attempting to fix the headphones she tore down with Superglue. 

It feels as if a lot more time has passed since we went at each other. I had all but forgotten it. 

She apologized that breakfast was nothing special. “Just little bits,” she said.  “Because I was up first and I had to get it out of the way so… Continental.  Call it continental.”

“Have you eaten?”

“I’m not supposed to, today. Couple of Red Bulls, I’ll be fine.”

She told me not to worry about her belongings. Anything that cannot go to charity has been cut up and put in bins all along the street.  The rest, she intends to leave her entire bag at her old favourite Oxfam this afternoon, taking herself back to the start, back to the skip which is the first thing she remembers.  The upstairs room has been tidied, cleaned, bed stripped and made up fresh.  The old sheets are washed, are in the dryer now, she’ll put them away before she leaves, she wishes she could give me some explanation for Doctor Watson but she can’t think of anything and the Boss did not provide her with one, he wouldn’t think of that, he probably didn’t think she would meet John or anybody, only told her to hide from Mycroft if he -

“Stop.”

“Yes, detective. Sorry.  I’ll be quiet.”  For all of forty seconds.  “Have you ever seen a body that got burned?”

Believe it or not, that is a bloody comforting thing to hear. It is the kind of question I have been expecting from the very first.  It’s the only kind of question which is, in fact, appropriate.  When somebody is going to die, one may expect either of two reactions – flight or fight.  Think about it.  Any confrontation evokes the fear of injury or death and those are the expected reactions to confrontation.  The Angel has made no attempt to fly away from her death.  Hasn’t exactly chosen to fight it either, but at least to meet it head on.  Now, finally, she has asked me a question appertaining to the qualities of her anticipated end.  Or in other words, she has chosen to know her enemy.

Before I can answer, the seventh stair gives its familiar clunk. I straighten in my chair.  The girl stands up from the wall and smooths down her hair, corrects a twist in her pyjama leg.  Then comes the timid little knock, and Mrs Hudson stepping in.

I haven’t seen so much of her, the last ten days. The constant company and the cooking have kept me from noticing until now.  Even this morning, my landlady does not have her eyes on _me_ when she says, “Just popping down the shops, love, need anything?”

And it is not me who answers, “Bread, if you don’t mind. And I think he needs milk too.”

“Nothing for the dinner?”

“No, that’s done.” And at my glance, “In the fridge.  Least I could do.”  Then she lifts her voice again, and starts towards Mrs Hudson.  “See, this is my last day.”

“Oh, sweetheart, _never_!” and the girl should have said something and they cluck sweetly, charmingly, about their afternoon baking, about recipes.  It’s been so nice to have another lady around, that sort of thing.  The girl’s etiquette for goodbyes is outstanding; gracious, winning, you’d think about her years later, how she smiled when she said her farewell. 

I get up in the middle of it and go to the kitchen, start boiling a beaker’s worth of water.

And when it is over, Mrs Hudson leans around where she can see me. “And _you_ ,” she spits, with heretofore unknown venom, almost making want to start nodding before I know the question.  Like a stern schoolteacher, “You say sorry for your behaviour, all those arguments.  And you say thank you.”

“I’m making tea!”

“A proper thank you!”

“I am making _tea_ ,” but still she shakes her head, doesn’t really seem to appreciate the enormity of the offering, withdrawing as if she has quite given up on me.  Ultimately, blessedly, she leaves. 

The girl understands, though. She remembers.  Remembers arriving here and being told to make her own.  Therefore, though her foot taps, though her eyes dart around the room and keep looking for clocks, she has to seat herself at the kitchen table and wait for the second beaker to boil. 

And because this is her last day, because I am supposed to have tried everything else, because she has been so resigned and whistled while she worked, the time has come to state the obvious. Honestly, though, I will be deeply irritated if this should work, because anybody else would have tried it on night one.  If this works, and we have both of us suffered the last ten days just because I gave her too much credit…

“You don’t have to go.”

A solemn nod and half a smile, “I do.”

“He has no control over you. Stay here.  Sit, watch television, let the time go by.  You will not turn to stone.”

“Doesn’t matter. I appreciate you trying to make it all sound easy, detective, but you’re fooling no one.”

Well, there you go, can’t say I didn’t at least try the obvious, and can’t say I was wrong not to try it before now. Just to kill off the conversation, a joke almost, “I could have you locked up.  If disobeying is a problem, I mean, I could have you arrested.  Not my brother, nicer people.  And it needn’t be forever.  It’ll just prevent you from-“  But her smile is turning sad, and she is bowing her head.  “No, well, quite…”

“Thank you. But no, alright?”

So it comes down to the two of us and tea. She drinks gratefully, if a little quickly.  I worry about her getting ill, you know.  Dosages aren’t my strong point, and it’s a very delicate balance, especially in one of so light a frame.  Another key fact about the beakers is their transparency; I can see exactly how much she has ingested when she starts to nod, when that horrible cycle of blinking too much and breathing too deeply begins to overcome her.  I hope she sleeps, hope it’s nothing deeper, nothing comatose and sickening to wake from, but again I stress, this is not my area.  I learned a great deal of what I am apply today from a single conversation with her Aunty Penny and I myself was in the position the Angel is now.

“Oh, I hate you,” she mutters, as soon as she realizes what is happening. “I haven’t even eaten, this is actually dangerous.  I’m supposed to…” and here she must pause and yawn, huge and racking, “…respect you, like the boss does, but I don’t, I actually fecking hate you.”

She tries to stand up, maybe thinking of running away, and knocks the chair out from beneath her. I go to her, my arm beneath both of hers, holding her up. 

Trying to fight away from me, she falters and faints. She weighs practically nothing when I lift her up.  Bearing her down the hallway, not knowing if she can hear me or has gone beyond that, “I’m sorry.  I know you were only doing what you felt you must.  Admirable, really, that you wanted everything to be so perfect for him.  If it’s any consolation, none of this is your fault, and you have been an excellent angel.”

In my bedroom, with my foot, I tip open one door of the wardrobe, then the other. I’ve done a little clearing out myself, just last night, have cleared out the base and made it comfortable with pillows and blankets.  A horrible place to put her, but it’s the only perfectly locked space in the flat; no second door, no breakable window, no way to sneak out.  I lay her down and lock her in. 

She will sleep, however, utterly alone.

I go to her bag, lying by the door, and fish out the stuffed tiger. Late last night I realized why she clung to it so fervently the morning I woke her up, why she grabbed it out of the blankets the second she realized she was in no danger, why it has been away out of sight.  That morning was the first time I saw it.  It was not in her bag on the first night when I searched it.  It was not in the small pile of belongings she carried upstairs with her.  It was already here.

Remember her teasing, saying she had a mobile phone? Remember my dismissing the idea, because there had been none when I searched her belongings?

Remember that first knock at the door?

Nothing preceded her. She dropped out of the sky.  Climbed the stairs in silence so complete I never heard her coming, and already knew about the upstairs room, and had already been told that’s where she’d be staying.

The tiger is too heavy for a soft toy. The merest squeeze turns up something square and hard inside.  The seam between the white belly and the stripes opens at a touch.  As simple as that.  It’s been sitting here all this time.  Holding that pouch open, a small, basic mobile phone drops into the palm of my hand. 


	14. Chapter 14

_Pls sir – cant do this – will stay away from home but pls say I can leve now._

_Mycroft nos im here, pls let me come back_

_I still have the old flat, will just hide there couple days, not even get out of bed?_

They have been in near constant contact the entire time. From the dates on the messages the phone was new when she arrived at Baker Street, but even then he was wishing her luck, and sweet dreams that first night spent upstairs.  But very quickly the pleasantries faded.  His replies got shorter, then down to one-word, then down to simple Y or N.  That’s when all her begging began.  Whether she truly was so terrified living in my presence, so lonely as she claims, whether she really did cry herself to sleep every night, is both unknown and unnecessary to know.  Even if it were true she never would have told him about it, except in the hope of clawing back his divine attention, the warmth and light of his inimitable love.

_Miss you loads_

_What else shud I have done, pls?_

_That smel is Mac’s tray, btw, u shud change it?_

These messages are not important, they are not even _interesting_ , and yet I find that I read them compulsively, rattling through them one to the next, began at the beginning and have reached the fourth or fifth day, learning nothing and yet unable to stop.  Story of that girl’s life; begging and going unnoticed.

I’ll make sure she’s noticed, afterward. Tonight will be the hardest.  But once the appointed time has passed, and without her phone and lifeline to him, it’s over.  She’s got nothing then.  Tonight she’ll try to run home.  She’ll need to be stopped.  I am fully prepared to be kicked, bitten and scratched.  Must warn Mrs Hudson about the possible screaming, but once I explain why, she’ll be on board.  Tonight, the girl will suffer, and the next few days won’t be easy.  But it _will_ pass.  It will, and at the end of it she’ll be free. 

There’ll be no more _Pls be careful u r clumsy with matches._

_Just a question not trying to get out of wat I have 2 do or anythin, but r u sure u’ll be ok after?_

_Do u want me to try callin Ms Mies again?_

Having never lived for anyone but myself, except in the most nugatory and uncomfortable of ways, I must admit to being rather baffled by a devotion of this sort. She thinks only of him.  Misguided, bizarre, deluded.  Loving.  Selfless, admirable. 

No, no, it isn’t. Psychotic.  Stockholm syndrome, after a fashion, absorption of the needs and desires of the one who broke her spirit.  Yes, that’s more like it.

I am waiting in the growing shadows of the churchyard at St Anne’s in Limehouse. A Hawksmoor church and, like the originator, tainted by rumours of diabolic haunting and superstition.  I’ve got one eye on the great pyramid standing towards the river; it bears the legend ‘the wisdom of Solomon’.  Solomon was the one who threatened to cut a child in half.  I haven’t seen fit to waste any energy on articulating why I’ve got one eye on that.  I have been here the entire time the sun was dropping.  That deep, bloody red coming in over the river, bouncing off the marble grave markers, the pale stone of the building, it was all very easy to imagine how a large fire will light the place after dark.  All too easy to add the details; soot blackening everything she touches, the flicker of flame, the screaming slinging itself in the branches of the trees like cobwebs, never to be blown away.

 _Cant wait 2 c u again_ , she started saying yesterday.

_I don’t have any family._

_Well, there r sum scumbags but u probs dont need 2 worry about them._

In more than one message, she tells him directly how she has not asked for her name. The wording is simple but repetitive, and they are the most desperate pleas of all.  Having gotten to know her, I hear the words between the words.  ‘I have done this for you.  I have not taken back that which you stole from me.  You keep that.  You can have it.  It’s okay.  I trust that I am better off without it.’ _My name is in the file but I didn look_

And all the while he was answering her as you would a prisoner, or a dog – yes, no, stay, stop, shut up.

Full dark comes with the tolling of the bell; eleven. Eleven thirty is the appointed time.  I could leave now.  I’d reach her at home, unlock the wardrobe door and…  and hopefully find her still asleep.  How much easier, to have her waken quiet and comfortable in the bed she’s become accustomed to.  Or at least that’s what she told me about it.  She’s told her boss it’s very hard and she doesn’t sleep much at all.  Still, better there than the base of that box, in the dark.  Better with me waiting to grab her when she tries to bolt and to explain to her it’s over, the time is gone.  Better that than opening the door at half-eleven at night and having her leap feral at me.  Not that I have imagined _that_ in any detail, not that I have had to shake the fear of it from my mind more than once.

I can’t wait to tell him. That she is going to be taken care of.  That his influence will fade.  That she will cease to belong to him.  I will tell him, she is going to ask me for her name.  What he stole, I will be returning to her.

Can’t bloody wait…

But the time gets closer, and nothing stirs. Nearby traffic, but not even enough of that to drown out the sound of the river, or the ruffle of roosting birds reshuffling, their moving the only breeze that shimmers the leaves on the trees.  Solomon’s pyramid stands pale in the dark, and undisturbed.  No shadow but mine wavers black on the streetlight-weakened city dark.  Forgive the poetry but I want you to understand, I am alone. 

Out on the road, the heavy putting of a cab’s exhaust, and I remember what chariots have borne God and angels down to us mortals in the past, but I turn to see it drive on by.

Scrolling to the end of the messages, I check that last exchange, the one that brought me here, and find that I have made no mistakes, have not misread. This is where she was told to come.  Unless I’ve made myself too obvious; Moriarty has seen me, known something was wrong, that the plan had been turned around, and he has escaped.

Not like him, you know, to skip the parlour scene. Really rather weak of him, to walk away just because he has lost this time.  I wouldn’t have expected that, if you’d asked me to guess.  Maybe this one is just closer to his heart.  Certainly the girl seemed to think so.

_It is ok. U shud keep this msg for after so ull no I told u – it is ok_

_Pls don’t let it hurt you_.

These little lapses, soft as kneading paws, these little girl attempts to soothe a conscience which simply does not exist, they’ve been going on since the beginning. Not a single one of them has ever received an answer. 

_If you ever do miss me it is ok bcoz werevr I m I miss u 2_

The chill that rolls over me reading that last one is stopped abruptly by the ringing of the phone. The incoming call is from the only number that has ever gone in or out of the machine and is therefore recognized.  However, it has never been assigned a name.  Make of that what you will.

I answer. A moment’s hesitation, but of course I do.  I answer.  “Hello?”

“He says nice try, detective.”

She sounds sickened and dreamy, outdoors somewhere, that emptiness, negative space around her voice on the far end of the line, no traffic, no breeze, no bells, nothing to hang on to. No… No, now comes a breath of laughter, and the shuffle of the phone being taken away. 

“I’m not happy about this,” and I am never ready for that voice. I have never been ready for it to be real, for it to belong to a living human, I have never been ready to hear it say anything, least of all when the words do not match the apparent sentiment, by which I only mean, he sounds quite too utterly delighted.  “What did you _give_ to her?  I have seen her high, concussed, poisoned but this is new.  This is like drunk and hungover at the same time.”  And I suppose the girl stumbles or something like it, because he laughs again.

I could have coped, if he had been here in person. But as a disembodied voice he is too much like his own ghost, unproven.  Too much like the God she made of him.

“She keeps saying she’s very sorry about your wardrobe? Does that mean anything to you?”

Yes. I ought to speak.  Not to answer him, but to speak, to say something out loud, to do something other than stand here mute in the wrong bloody graveyard in the dead of night. 

Far away beyond him I hear her singing, _Some people say I’ve done alright for a girl_.

She knew, didn’t she? She knew all along when and where she would be killed, and knew from the beginning that I would find her phone.  I was supposed to do it much sooner.  She has assumed always that I was reading these messages as they came and went, one by one, and has not cared.  She was preceded.  And I was not paying attention.

“You know I almost don’t think I should do it now, given she’s incapacitated-“ and he is stopped by her lifting her voice in background, a long loud chorus of ‘no-no-no I’m fine, I swear, cross my heart and-‘, “And kiss a pig, yes, dear, I know.” Sweet and indulgent, like a kind uncle, the air around him changes as he kneels or crouches, maybe coming down to whatever level she has found herself on, because I can hear her better now.

“I’m ready,” she says. “You shouldn’t worry.  I didn’t have to come.”

“Well, that’s true.” He could be talking to either of us.  “And I have all your messages to prove it, don’t I?  You’ve seen her messages, detective.  Do you think I can go on ahead?  Consent-wise, I mean.”

She mumbles and it is something about matches.

“I feel like I should tell you,” he says, that rush of air again, leaving her behind on the ground while we talk above her, we the grown ups, or more than that, the gods, who have decided her fate or allowed it to come to pass respectively, who have both held her life, the shattered pieces of it, in our hands and done nothing but damage. We who have been the beginning and end of her, and he feels like he should tell me, “You can hang up now, or you can stay on the line and we’ll both of us hear her burn.”

I hear the match rasp on the paper like it was next to my own ear.

And if he is holding the phone, there is only one conclusion to draw; that she has struck the match herself. Then comes that rounded, muffled roar, not so much a noise as the sudden absence of it, the first shell of fire around her eating every speck of oxygen it can move to.  It fills her throat, even, and torments the wail that tries to tear her open.   The noise is inhuman. 

It does not, however, drown out the little click, of the phone being set down on some hard surface, so as not to be disturbed, and perhaps so Moriarty can step away from the blaze.


	15. Chapter 15

Morning finds me. I don’t go looking for it.  It comes creeping, peering in at the windows like a prying neighbour.  It is nothing to me, however, except a change in the light.  I go from absolute darkness, only the occasional pulse from my phone when I’ll pick it up, waken it, only to realize that I have no idea who I might wish to call, to dull pink, to the ugly mix while the streetlights are deciding to go out, into daytime.  All of it happens without my input, would happen even if I were to tell it not to.  I would like that, you know.  I am not entirely sure I do not ask out loud, once or twice, for dawn to piss off another couple of hours.  Naturally it takes no heed.

I’m not sure what time I arrived back last night. I am not sure if the cigarette butt on the saucer on the coffee table has been there since the other day (seems unlikely, such a thorough little cleaner, that girl), or if she lit a new one before she left (erasing herself, a possibility, less effective, this time, those chocolate bars she likes, for instance, can still smell those everywhere), or if I lit that.  Even if I did, nothing to be ashamed of; judging by the amount of ash it was left to burn of its own accord.

That thought is what finally gets me up from the sofa, to pick up the saucer, to take it to the kitchen, to wash the ash down the sink and scrub the surface, to run the water until there is no trace of it, until there isn’t a smell.

And I wasn’t there. What would it be, how would it feel, to have a damp, tide-edged stain on one’s cuff that stank of the accelerant?  What would it be to have the first flame, the precise shade of blue before the candle-wick yellow, appear in the dark every time one shut one’s eyes?  Does he feel that, or anything?  The temptation is to say no, but then the temptation is _always_ to make monsters out of the evil, to believe that inhuman action could never come from a human being.  The truth is, I cannot anticipate what, if anything, Moriarty might be feeling this morning.

But the girl could have. If she were here, if she _could_ be here, she could have told me in a heartbeat.

I never doubted for a second that she _knew_ him, but I got it all wrong otherwise.  I thought of her as the source.  Locations, names, plans, all of this could have been pried from her if I had decided to take a different tack.  But she knows more than that, and which would have been of more use.  She knows _him_ , not as the fairy tale monster he presents, but as a man.  A _person_ , who gave her roller skates, liked her cheesecake, who, on very rare and special occasions, hugged her.  She could tell me in a moment what he’s feeling this morning, she knows him so well.  

Knew… She knew.

No one ever went back to the phone he called me on. The screaming died away quickly.  Probably not because the pain died, nor because she suffocated first as he had half-promised her, but more likely because she had no breath to scream with.  Then there were earthy thumps that might have been seizing muscles, flailing limbs.  Then just the crackling.

Left her too long. Shouldn’t have trusted the drug like I did.  Should have had somebody watching.  John.  John could have stopped her when she woke up.  Terrible racket she must have made – the side panel of the wardrobe is broken away and splintered.  As far as I can tell she braced herself between the back and locked doors and kicked her way out.  Makes very little sense in the context of her spindly limbs and the narcotic after-effects, and all the sense in the world in the context of her devotion and determination.  People can do incredible things where the people they love are concerned.

Picture the state of her feet, already scabbed and weak. Picture her shoulder bruised from forcing her way out. 

Maybe, hopefully, she was still numbed by what made her sleep.

Where’s my brother when you bloody need him? Where’s all his surveillance when she left the house, after me, full of splinters probably, with everything she owned in one bag, stumbling and out of her mind?  Answer me that; where does he go when he’s actually needed?  As terrified as she may have been at the prospect of one of his secluded little cells, she wouldn’t have burned.  But then again I could have given her to Mycroft, couldn’t I?  If not when he first came looking, I could have given her over any time.  If I’d wanted her in one of those concrete boxes she could have been.  Could have had her in a prison cell.  Could have just bloody handcuffed her to a radiator, let’s see her kick her way out of that. 

I’m sure there was some reason I did what I did in the manner that I did it, but if my very life depended upon recalling it now I would willingly lay down my head for the guillotine.

I made a mistake. No, no, I made a number of them, a sequence that began almost the moment she arrived at the flat, began the moment I told her she was not a pawn, and even I myself believed that.  From there, I didn’t stop, did I?  One followed hard upon the other, lurching from disaster to inaction to new mistakes and ultimately into complacency, thinking it was all so sorted.  Here at the end, all the mistakes there were to be made have been made, and the girl is dead. 

Once or twice, I hear the first whisper of comfort, trying to tell me she would never have been stopped. Think of her on the phone last night.  Think of the fire noise the moment the match was struck, no, don’t, never think of that…  But she must have already been doused in whatever provided that swift and sudden flame.  Ragged, hair slick with it, clothes sticking to her at the joints.  Bare feet.  Somehow I know that her feet were bare when she burned.  There is no objective proof, only that in some way I knew her, and I know her feet were bare.  She already reeked of petrol or lighter fluid or something else easily and widely available, something that can be bought unquestioned.  She was telling her beloved God to make a martyr of her even as he pretended to hesitate.  She never could have been stopped.

_And if you prevent me, I will take care of it myself, here, in your flat, and –_

And she could have been stopped. And she could have gotten better.  Years and years and all the pills in the world, but she could have bloody gotten better, except that…  Except that I didn’t even try, did I?

“You back on the fags again?” A voice, not mine; I jump, but only a few seconds after the sound itself, only once I’ve figured it out this isn’t something I am remembering or imagining. Turn and find Lestrade hovering near the door.  “Alright,” he says, “Calm down.”

“It is customary to _knock_ ,” I tell him.

“Door was open.” Wide open; looking at it objectively I’d say flung that way by someone who didn’t much care about closing it again, as long as he was inside, somewhere known and familiar and safe.  “Anyway, I did.  What’s the matter?”

His brow furrows when he says a thing like that. On anybody else would be an expression of worry, concern, but on Lestrade, with that slight backwards pull of the head, the one that doubles up his chins, all I ever get from it is vague distaste, the incomprehension of a man who allows himself to feel all the inexplicable pains and self-pities of any modern male but still does not expect to encounter them in others.  I breathe in, and it is my intention to begin with, _You have come to tell me about a gruesome crime scene_ , before proceeding to be the one who tells him about it. 

At the last moment, something stops me. Some flicker in his gaze, maybe, or just some thought that flees behind it, some moment with which I am not entirely comfortable and I change tack.  “You’re early, this morning.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a funeral at ten o’clock. They want the police presence in the graveyard minimal by then.”

…No. No, I went to the graveyard.  And the girl told me she would be left dead at the place where she died.  She didn’t die there.

“What graveyard, what are you talking about?” Christ, don’t let him be here on something separate, I can’t, I cannot this morning, I could not bear it.

“Horrible business.”

Now, finally, he comes away from the door. Still leaving it open, you’ll note.  Maybe we all have the same idea; just to get inside, to get away.  Just to leave the door open, in case we need to run from this place too.  Because I am apparently _back on the fags_ , Lestrade doesn’t feel too awful about showing that he’s in the same state, lighting up one of his own.  He offers the pack to me, but I decline, because I know what will happen next; he goes to light it, and as he leans towards the flame his eyes fix on it, and he stops.  Takes the cigarette from his lips and jams it crooked back in the pack.  Again, and with a dry throat this time, “Horrible business.  Girl dead.  And before you start, no, not like there usually is –“

Shaking my head, “I didn’t speak.”

“You were going to, you always bloody do.” Do I?  First instinct is to deny it, and to be affronted.  Second is to admit that yes, I always bloody do.  Normally by now I’d have rolled my eyes at least twice, be tapping my foot, be prompting him on to tell me something about the case itself.  ‘Girl dead’ is nothing, a premise and the sex of the victim, that’s nothing.  Move on to ‘burnt’, move onto ‘wings’, move onto where, where, where should I have been when I was standing in Hawksmoor’s shadow at Limehouse, where?

“Anyway,” he says, “You’ll like this one.” No, not today, but any other time…  And he is thinking of this as any other time…   “There’s finally a body at your grave.”

I was in the wrong graveyard. I was looking for the wisdom of Solomon, when the real answer wasn’t a riddle but a joke.  A joke with the dates on my grave for a punchline. 

Forgive me, anyone who hears it and any passing god, forgive me, but I check the date on my watch, to make sure it isn’t April first.

“Horrible,” that seems to be the only word he can give it, and for this too he seems to expect my scorn. Needless to say I give none, and to even dream that it is a habit of mine stings somewhat.  The circumstances, that’s all it is.  It’s just this morning, it’s just how it’s happened.  It’s nothing to do with me.  I’ll be fine any other time.  “Horrible business.  She’s burned away to nothing, Sherlock.”

“…Accelerant? Suicide?”

“They haven’t starting testing, yet. Wondered if you’d want to see it at the scene, before they…”  He swallows, nauseated, “Before they prise her off your headstone.”

 _Some people say I’ve done alright for a girl_.

“I’ll get my coat.”

My coat, unfortunately, is through in the bedroom. And Lestrade, fingers flexing for a cigarette, in need a distraction from the images he is clearly carrying with him, follows.  I haven’t the energy to stop him, wouldn’t know how to do it without arousing suspicion, drawing him on.  Suspicions are aroused anyway, would only have been strengthened, when he sees the ruined wardrobe.  He curses under his breath, “What happened here?”

“Research,” I say. Don’t ask me why.  I am lying and I do not know why, which is simultaneously a bad sign and one I should be paying attention to.  “Thickness of wood, strength of an average man… Don’t ask.”

“And here?”

I turn as I shrug on my coat, to see him pointing. There wall, there’s a hole in the wall.  It was made, and any detective really ought to be able to spot this, by the heel of a dress shoe, thrown hard.  You don’t need to read the depth of the damage to the plaster or the shape of it to see that; the shoe is on the floor not far from it with plaster dust whitening the heel.  If you’re looking at the room at all, you see the other shoe on the pile of everything that came out of the wardrobe.  Whoever threw it grabbed it from there, possibly while they were studying the splintered break on the wood panel, judging from the width of it that a small girl could have forced herself out through it. 

I suppose, by simple process of elimination, _I_ must have done it, but I don’t recall that.

Don’t ask me what I’ve done, what sign or signal I’ve given to give myself up, but Lestrade turns to me now, “Sherlock, did you already know about this?”

“King,” I tell him. “Her name was Elizabeth King.”


End file.
